How To Throat-Sing

STEP 1: The shape of the mouth

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Relax the muscles of your jaw and lips. Keep your mouth open with about one
centimeter between your upper and lower teeth.
(Dan Bennett adds: you may need to stiffen the muscles in your lips and tongue later on when you're
working on the quality and pitch of the resonance.)

STEP 2: The location of the tip of the tongue

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Place the tip of your tongue against the roof of your mouth, as if pronouncing
the letter "L". Slide the point of contact slightly away from the roots of your top
teeth. Press the tip of your tongue quite firmly against the roof of your mouth.
In Japanese, we don't use the "L"-sound at all. (The closest sound we have is
like ["L" + "R"]/2. That's why we can't tell "L" and "R" apart.) If you have "L"
in your native language, at least this part of the instructions is well understood!.

STEP 3: The mouth as a resonator

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The characteristic sound of throat-singing actually comes from strong harmonic

resonance in the mouth, which is achieved by establishing a resonant chamber.
This resonator is made up of the roof of your mouth and your tongue. Keep the
tip of your tongue against the roof of your mouth as described in the previous
step. Then drop the main body of your tongue to increase the volume above it.
The sides of your tongue should touch your side teeth (molars), forming a seal.
Make the capsule round and airtight so that you can't breath through your
mouth.

STEP 4: A small vent-hole

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 Make a small vent-hole between one (or both) side(s) of the root of your tongue
and the roof of your mouth (or your side-teeth). In other words, a small portion
of the contact zone between the tongue and the roof of the mouth (or side-teeth)
is now opened. The air goes through the vent and passes by some of your
grinding teeth. If you hold your nose now, you'll be able to breathe through this
vent only.
Keep this vent hole as small as possible. If you breathe now, you will hear a
sound like "hu" of the English word "human", with "pink noise" instead of your
voice.
Your oral cavity has just become an "instrument" for throat-singing.

STEP 5: The volume of the resonator

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The melody part of throat-singing is produced by changing the volume of the

resonant chamber. To do this, move the central part of your tongue up and
down without detaching the side parts of your tongue from the roof of the
mouth (or side-teeth), except of course for the vent hole you made in the
previous step. Don't collapse the chamber completely: you just make it flatter
or rounder.
Try to change the volume as mentioned above while making the "hu"- noise
(pink noise) constantly. You will hear the pitch of the noise changing.

STEP 6: Vocalization
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THIS WILL BE YOUR FIRST STEP AS A THROAT-SINGER!

While maintaining the shape of the mouth as described in the previous steps,
try to vocalize the sound "oooo" (the vowel in "cool"). If all's well, you'll hear a
flute-like sound. The waveform of this sound is close to a sine curve which is
produced at the resonant frequency of the chamber in your mouth. A voice
consists of many kinds of pure sine-wave at different, but related frequencies.
These are theharmonics of your voice. The aim of throat-singing is to
emphasize chosen harmonics by tuning the resonance in your mouth. In this
 case, the sound should have a tone more than one octave higher than your
"oooo".
You must be very careful not to miss the flute-like sound you made beyond
the "oooo" voice. On your first attempt, the flute-like sound will be
heard very weakly. Most people actually succeed in making this sound on their
first attempt, but cannot discern if it appears or not!
Try to change the volume of the resonant chamber and the shape of your lips
very carefuly to seek the proper resonance point. You will find several
resonances at different musical pitches. You can play music using these sound.

DON'T WORRY IF YOU CAN'T DO IT!

There are some helpful hints in the next step.

STEP 7: Hints and tips

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If you couldn't make the flute-like sound, there are two possible causes. They
are very important because they are directly connected with the way to improve
your throat-singing.
Firstly, your mouth chamber may not have a proper shape or volume for
resonance. Change them carefully according to the instructions in STEP 5.
Slow and careful changing of the chamber will help you to find the resonance.
Try to change the shape of the front of your mouth too.
Secondly, it's quite possible that your vocal "oooo" doesn't contain sufficiently
strong harmonics that can resonate in your mouth. (Is your "oooo" very soft and
calm?) Beginners sometimes give up before getting the hang of this.
The sound wave which resonates in your mouth has quite a high frequency.
Thus all you have to do is vocalize an "oooo"-sound which contains sufficient
high-frequency sound energy. I don't mean that you vocalize "oooo" one octave
higher! I mean that you should vocalize with as bright a throat-sound as
possible. (If Louis Armstrong had tried throat-singing, he'd have been
successful!)
To get the proper "oooo" sound, imagine the following situation: when you're
practising throat-singing, some one comes up to you angrily shouting "Be quiet,
man!" and strangles you. Naturally, you keep practising. This would result in a
strong, bright tone from your throat. You got it! You are "oooo"-ing with an
ideal voice sound.
Once you've got this voice with rich high-frequency components, the volume of
the "oooo" itself may be reduced. This helps the flute-like sound to be heard
more clearly. In this case, the voice which is kept while throat-singing sounds
like a drawn-out "we" in English, or "oui" in French, which is written in
Japanse as the letters shown in the background of our pages.