Grade 8 watch the hidden overtone melody of Tuvan throat singing on a spectrogram.

Year 9 are studying music from Central Asia, and on a first listen to the Tuvan group Huun-Huur-Tu most of the class hear a low drone and miss the melody above it. The teacher opens Chrome Music Lab's Spectrogram on the board, which listens through the laptop microphone, and plays a track featuring the sygyt style from the teacher's Spotify account through the classroom speakers. The screen shows the drone as a stack of steady horizontal bands, and above them one bright band stepping between the harmonic levels: the whistled melody the singer makes by shaping the mouth to pick out single overtones. The teacher plays the passage three times with a pause between each, and by the third hearing most of the class can pick out the melody they have been watching. Students sketch the contour of the overtone line in their books and write a short explanation of how one singer can produce two parts at once.

Tools: Chrome Music Lab, Spotify Nine ideas for your own version in Generate