Welcome to the third Episode of the Between the Vocal Folds podcast. Every episode features a new guest from the music industry to discuss any and all topics related to singing and the voice. This week’s guest is Matthew Kocel, who is a throat singer, multi-instrumentalist and recording artist, making waves in the global sound healing movement. We’re really excited today to have Matthew on the podcast and look forward to hearing about the vocal technique of throat singing and Matthew’s journey to becoming a throat singer.
What is Throat Singing?
Kaitie:
What is throat singing for those of us that might not be familiar with it? And how is it different than more conventional styles of singing?
Matthew Kocel:
Well, throat singing can also be called overtone singing, and it’s a process of shaping the sound produced by our vocal chords to make the harmonics or overtones that are already present in our voice, more audible to the human ear. So each of us, even though we don’t hear them so readily, we haven’t been trained to listen for overtones or harmonics. Our voices are producing these additional tones, in addition to the fundamental tone of what we are mostly dialing into with our ears and our awareness. And by shaping the sound, I’m able to amplify specific harmonics to make them more audible to the human ear. This has the effect of sounding like two voices at once or three or four, depending on the technique. There can be multiple harmonics that are brought into awareness with throat singing and overtone singing.
Kaitie:
So the more conventional style of singing would be just focusing on the fundamental only, mainly, and just using the overtones or harmonics more to just color that fundamental, but not really bringing them out?
Matthew Kocel:
Yeah. So this is exaggerating that coloring of the fundamental that a lot of singers are already doing and the profile of the harmonics really affects the timbre of what we are hearing. So this is how we can tell the difference between let’s say a clarinet and a guitar playing the same note is the harmonic structure that they’re putting out. A lot of people ask me, what is an overtone? What’s a harmonic? And I explain it by using a string instrument, as an example, we pluck that string on a guitar, let’s say, and we register with our ears and our awareness, the fundamental tone, because there’s a specific number of vibrational waves coming off of this string per second, those waves double on themselves, and then multiply again and again into infinity. So those multiplications of the fundamental tone are the harmonics or overtones. There’s additional notes stack on top of the fundamental. And again, by shaping those from the voice, with the human instrument, with a mouth, tongue placement, et cetera, we make them more audible.
Kaitie:
Where did this practice originate from, throat singing?
Matthew Kocel:
I have no idea, but it’s become popularized today, mostly from the Tuvan area, which borders Mongolia. Also in Mongolia, a lot of Tuvan and Mongolian throat singers are going public in the West and being popularized on YouTube videos and videos that are circulating through social media. My first experience of throat singing, of hearing this sound goes back to 1988 or 1989. And I was a rocker. I was playing, I was a bass player and singer. And the first time I walked into a metaphysical store of any kind, they were playing a recording of the Gyuto monks from Tibet. And at this time I didn’t even know what a mantra was, but I walked into this wall of sound, they had this recording really loud and it was so powerful. I was almost frightened by it, but I was also simultaneously attracted to it.
So this has been practiced in Tibet and in the Central Asian areas for probably thousands of years. I’m now aware of various throat singing and overtone singing traditions that are from around the world. And it turns out in Northern Europe, there’s a very long term overtone. They call it overtone singing. And there’s variations in the technique. Typically, you don’t hear the European overtone singers do that lower harmonic throat singing like the Tibetans and Tuvan’s and Mongolians do, but they have a very beautiful array of harmonic techniques that magnify the harmonics and overtones in the upper registers on top of the fundamental.
On Playing Vocally
Kaitie:
Some of our more popular and on demand lessons on the Singdaptive platform are on this idea of playing vocally, which opens up so many new possibilities with the voice. And now we know that you started off in rock bands, so I’m wondering how you got involved in this area of music. And if any of it had to do with simply just experimenting with your voice.
Matthew Kocel:
Experimentation was probably 90% of it. So once I heard the Gyuto monks from Tibet, I bought a cassette tape because this was late 80s and I started meditating to it and trying to mimic their sound and I was unsuccessful. And like I said, I didn’t even know what a mantra was yet. And it’s all mantras that they’re chanting. I had been playing in rock bands for about 17 years. I was living in Denver, Colorado, and of course, way before the internet existed. So in those days you really needed a major record label deal to have any type of “success”. And I never broke out of the local scene in Denver. I got to make some beautiful music and played with some fabulously talented musicians, but these projects, I put all this work into it and paying my dues over and over again. And a lot of suffering along the way to be quite frank. And then, the project would blow up for one reason or another.
And in 1994, my last band, which was my favorite, broke up. And I just knew at that point, this was a turning point for me. And I had been longing to live more holistically in general and also to have more of a spiritual focus in my life. So at that point, I actually, for the most part, quit playing music. I turned my back on music, put my bass away, and I got into healing arts. In that process of leading guided meditations, eventually there was a point where I couldn’t find words in the English language to really describe what I was feeling or perceiving. So I started to just own, to transmit. And people told me that they could feel the energy from my voice or from somewhere moving through them with the sound and moving around them. And I was hearing more texture in the voice than I had ever been aware of when I was belting into a microphone in the loud atmosphere with my bands.
And so I explored the harmonics more and more, and they were revealing themselves to me. It was like this whole new world. Eventually, but yet I still couldn’t do that deep overtone throat singing. So there’s a gentleman in Boulder, Colorado named Jonathan Goldman who’s a pioneer in modern times of research into sound – the concept of sound healing, which is using sound or music for healing and meditation. He’s written several books and multiple albums he’s recorded. And he had a weekend workshop about sound healing. There was a lot of information and it only taught a couple of overtone singing techniques, but he demonstrated one Tibetan style deep OM. And he said, “Some people will get this after being around others who do it.” And in that moment, I was like, that is me. And sure enough, the next day I popped it and it came out.
And I haven’t looked back and that was the opening for music to come back into my life, through healing arts.
On Experimentation
Kaitie:
So you first figured out how to do the overtone singing from that teacher in Colorado. From there, did you self-teach yourself, the other techniques that you use, or did you manage to find someone else to learn that from, or maybe use the same teacher or?
Matthew Kocel:
I kept on experimenting and I went out and got my first singing bowl, which was a Tibetan style or Himalayan style metal singing bowl, which led me to then get a crystal bowl. Eventually, I got my first harmonium. And so these things gave me a platform to experiment with, a little bit of support, support to experiment with. And I kept on adding more of this instruentation into the meditations that I was leading.
Kaitie:
Awesome. And just so our listeners know, singing bowl is not a bowl that is used for some sort of singing, it is actually a bowl that sings where you can take a mallet and run it across the edge of a bowl and it will create a very distinct tone. And depending on the size of the bowl, the pitch of the tone will be different. And a harmonium is a small pipe organ that is really popular in religious music, specifically from India.
Matthew Kocel:
When I moved to Vancouver initially in the early 2000s, I met a gentlemen up here that was a throat singer and had a group, Jerry DesVoignes, local throat singer. And so a mutual friend gave me Jerry’s number and told me he might be interested in having another throat singer join his band. So I called him up and got his voicemail on the phone. So I figured, well, this is my audition. So rather than talking, I just throat sang into the phone, and that was pretty much my entry into the band.
Kaitie:
Awesome.
Matthew Kocel:
Yeah, we met and hit it off. And so I was a member of the One Voice Harmonic Choir for about three years, but performing with One Voice Harmonic Choir got me thinking, okay, there’s a crossover between ceremony or meditation and performance. And so my meditations morphed into something that is, again, straddling the worlds between performance and meditation or spiritual ceremony.
Kaitie:
It definitely sounds like experimentation with the voice has been a big part of leading you to where you are today, which is super cool. My last question for you then today is if you have any advice to give to someone who might be wanting to start developing this type of singing.
Matthew Kocel:
Well, I always tell my students to allow yourself to be childlike and play with your voice and give yourself that freedom to be as a kid experimenting with no one else around. It brings me back to when I was about 10 years old, I had two older brothers, I’m the youngest in my family. One time I came home and I had the house to myself after school and I had one of those metal wagons and the handle was hollow. And for some reason I started sending my voice into that hollow tube of the handle. And I got this intense sounds that I just went off for, I don’t even know how long doing all kinds of crazy sounds. I didn’t know what was happening at the time, but looking back, I went into an altered state. I was definitely buzzed from that.
And then I stopped because I thought I heard someone come home, but being in that space, if I would’ve kept doing it, who knows, I could’ve become an overtone singer at 10 years old. But just that attitude or that freedom is very important to allow yourself to not judge the sounds that are coming out and give yourself the freedom to really break things down.
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