Music – Tibet

Somehow, this blog has become a music blog too. I first heard Tibetan singing during the movie Red River Valley and was immediately fascinated by it. There seemed to a certain quality in the singer’s voice that I had hardly, if ever, heard before, a sense of a great expanse. It seems to be particularly prominent when the singer reached the higher registers of her range. Wikipedia then provides this description – “the loud, projecting voice of traditional Tibetan singing” with “a wide vocal range and long phrases.” Though I can’t confirm this, it seems that this ‘projecting’ quality of Tibetan singing is related to the altitude of Tibet (approx. 3,000 metres above sea level), which in turn affects the capacity of the lungs, as well as affecting the vocal cords. Interesting, but so far, I haven’t been able to properly verify whether this is true or not.

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And as a point of comparison, the same song sung but with a different style. Strangely enough, this singer, too, is Tibetan. This version of the song is sung in Mandarin Chinese, not Tibetan: