Sometimes your overtones are more powerful than your fundamental. Why?

[rasputin1963]

Working on a spectrogram today, looking at a singer's voice (in this case, Linda Ronstadt's). The green warbles you see are her fundamental note of the moment, plus their overtones. I notice that sometimes, on some notes, her overtones are more powerful (in decibels...and in visible green glow) than the fundamental is. In this case, a pitch one octave above, and a fifth above that, are more powerful than the notes she formed with her throat as the fundamental. And sometimes even overtones higher than those first two glow more brightly than the fundamental. Very interesting. Why do you suppose that happens?

[MikeRivers]

Overtones are what makes sounds more interesting than sine waves. From your spectrogram, it's hard to tell about the relative amplitude between the fundamental and harmonics - often a spectrogram display uses color to indicate amplitude, with the vertical axis being frequency and horizontal axis being time. But, yeah, her voice would sound pretty unusual without the overtones.

 

Look at some instruments. Thery're interesting, too. And if your spectrogram program allows you to delete frequencies, try that and listen to what happens.

[nat whilk II]

The original Rondstadt track could be EQ'd to reduce too much harmonic content around the fundamental, leaving the overtones still at full tilt. That would be a somewhat random event, but it's not uncommon in pop music for too many instruments to play right on top of the same note, so the engineer cuts around that point.

 

But the human voice can do odd things - there are various parts of the body resonating with the fundamental, and some head cavity or other could certainly boost an overtone if it's just the right one.

 

I noticed Stevie Wonder at times seemed to find a note and hold it that sounded like there was a really strong overtone component in just that note -like he found a resonance point and liked the sound and feel of it and would hold notes right there to milk it.

 

And of course there's the throat/overtone singers - not just from Mongolia anymore...

 

 

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nat whilk ii

 

 

 

[WRGKMC]

Use an oscilloscope to view sound and it will make a whole lot more sense seeing what the wave is doing in relation to what you're actually hearing. You'll be able to see the harmonics riding on the fundamental waveform in piggy back fashion. you'll likely find the harmonics and overtones are always smaller then the fundamental wave unless the fundamental wave is nulled through phase cancellation.