Every Note You Hear Is Secretly a Chord

Sing one note and you've sung a chord. Every note from a voice, a string or a horn is a stack of quieter notes - the harmonic series - and the major chord is sitting in it. We switch those hidden notes on one at a time in my own voice, find C, E and G inside a single C, see where the piano's twelve notes really come from (and where they miss), then follow the series through a bugle's Taps, a real alphorn, a barbershop quartet's ringing seventh, every vowel you say, Tuvan throat singing and the yiḏaki. CHAPTERS 0:00 A chord inside one note 0:23 Switching the hidden notes on 1:34 Where the major chord comes from 2:59 Where our twelve notes come from 6:01 The notes between the keys 7:52 A barbershop seventh 9:30 Your mouth is an EQ 10:46 Throat singing and the yiḏaki 12:54 Twelve notes, an estimation SOURCES AND FURTHER READING Only the first five to eight harmonics can be heard out of a note: Plomp (1964), 'The ear as a frequency analyzer', JASA 36; Moore & Gockel (2011) — https://doi.org/10.1121/1.1919256 Joseph Sauveur named the 'harmonics' (1701), in his work for the Académie royale des sciences — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_... The Tsimané rated consonant and dissonant chords equally pleasant: McDermott, Schultz, Undurraga & Godoy (2016), Nature 535 — https://doi.org/10.1038/nature18635 Major/minor valence tracks exposure to Western music: Smit, Milne, Sarvasy & Dean (2022), PLOS ONE — https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.... Taps uses only the bugle's 3rd to 6th partials — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taps_(b...) Britten, Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op. 31 (premiered 15 Oct 1943, Peter Pears and Dennis Brain): the Prologue on natural harmonics, the 11th included - Boosey & Hawkes — https://www.boosey.com/ Barbershop 'lock and ring': Barbershop Harmony Society, Contest & Judging Handbook, Singing category. Measured quartets come close to 4:5:6:7 but not exactly (Hagerman & Sundberg 1980), so it is the ideal they aim for — https://www.barbershop.org/ Vowel formants, men's averages: Hillenbrand, Getty, Clark & Wheeler (1995), 'Acoustic characteristics of American English vowels', JASA 97(5); averaged here from their own data — https://doi.org/10.1121/1.411872 Tuvan throat singing as two merged formants focused on one harmonic: Bergevin et al. (2020), eLife — https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.50476 The yiḏaki's drone and its player's throat resonances: Wolfe et al., UNSW Music Acoustics — https://newt.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/didj... Taps, played on bugle by a member of the U.S. Army Band - public domain (U.S. Army work); moved up a whole step for this video — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... Didgeridoo played by Jimmie P Rodgers, recorded by qubodup - CC0 (public domain); not a Yolngu recording: the physics only — https://freesound.org/people/qubodup/... Alphorns on a Swiss balcony at dusk, recorded by Zozzy - CC0 (public domain) — https://freesound.org/people/Zozzy/so... Tuvan throat singing, sygyt and kargyraa, by nemaavla - CC0 (public domain) — https://freesound.org/people/nemaavla... and https://freesound.org/people/nemaavla... Left out: that the harmonic series CHOSE our twelve notes. It explains why the octave, fifth and fourth sound stable; the twelve came from stacking fifths and compromising. Also left out: blue notes as the 7th harmonic (one disputed study; most measured blue sevenths sit nearer 9:5), and Britten's reported 'anyone who plays it in tune' quote (no primary source found) All music and voices are my own; the recordings credited above are public domain or CC0. Made with Blender, Python and a lot of measuring. Corrections are welcome and will be pinned.