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Inchindown overtones

from De Proportionibus by Benedict Slotte

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(NOTE: This track has high dynamics and low bass. Protect your loudspeakers and hearing.)

Overtone singing is a special technique by which one voice can sing two pitches at once. This is achieved by amplification of a selected overtone, to the point that it starts being heard as a second pitch, in the vocal tract. The overtone singing part in this piece comes from an improvisation recorded in 2014, originally having a different accompaniment than the one heard here.

The nowadays abandoned Inchindown oil tanks in Invergordon, Scotland, formerly used as emergency supplies by the Royal Navy, have been found to have the longest reverberation time (RT60) of any human-built structure: 75 seconds (broadband). This is many times longer than the reverberation heard in any of the world’s biggest cathedrals. For this piece, the overtone singing part and its accompaniment were virtually placed in one such oil tank by means of a convolution process using actual measured impulse responses from the tank. This recreates what the overtone singing and accompaniment had sounded like if they had originally been recorded in the oil tank. The dimensions of the actual tank are 9 m (width) x 237 m (length) x 13.5 m (height).

The accompaniment consists of two bells of Turku Cathedral, Finland, an orchestral bass drum, and a Haken Continuum synthesizer. The bass drum was doubled and virtually placed so that one is heard at close range and another, together with the synthesizer, far away close to the distant end of the oil tank.

Original impulse responses were recorded by Trevor Cox (University of Salford) and Matt Gray. These originals were further combined, extrapolated and equalized for the purposes of this piece.

Overtone singing, orchestral bass drum and impulse response processing: Benedict Slotte.

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from De Proportionibus, released October 4, 2020

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Benedict Slotte Finland

Specialist in areas of acoustics, doing artistic things on the side. Specialties: choir singing, overtone singing, synthesizers (mainly Haken Continuum), sound design, sound synthesis, photography.

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