David Hykes & The Harmonic Choir

Drone is a minimalist music genre defined by sustained tones, long durations, and extremely gradual change. Harmony is often static or centered on a single fundamental with subtle overtone shifts, while rhythm tends toward stasis or very slow pulses. Sound sources range from acoustic instruments (e.g., strings, organ, bagpipes, shruti box, tambura) to electronics (sine waves, oscillators, feedback, tape loops, and later digital synthesis and processing). Many composers favor just intonation or other alternative tuning systems to emphasize beating patterns, psychoacoustic effects, and the internal life of sound. Although drone as a sonic principle is ancient and global, the modern experimental genre cohered in the 1960s through the New York minimalists and related avant‑garde circles, then spread into ambient, experimental, and heavy music scenes. The focus is less on melody and more on timbre, resonance, and the phenomenology of listening.

Electroacoustic music is a broad art-music tradition that integrates recorded acoustic sound and electronically generated or processed sound into coherent musical works. It privileges timbre, gesture, texture, and spatialization over conventional melody-and-harmony song forms, often employing tape manipulation, synthesis, live electronics, and computer-based signal processing. Works are frequently composed for fixed media (stereo or multichannel loudspeakers) and may also involve live performers who are transformed in real time. Concert presentation typically emphasizes spatial diffusion and immersive listening, and the repertoire spans concert works, radio pieces, installations, and soundscape compositions.

Musique concrète is an electroacoustic approach to composition that uses recorded real‑world sounds (objets sonores) as primary material rather than traditional instruments or notation. Composers edit, splice, loop, reverse, time‑stretch, filter, and otherwise transform these recordings to create works designed for loudspeakers. Emerging in late‑1940s France, it introduced acousmatic listening—focusing on the sound itself, detached from its source—along with a morphology‑based vocabulary of gesture, texture, and timbre. Historically realized on tape and now on digital audio workstations, musique concrète privileges montage and transformation over conventional harmony and meter, inviting listeners into a rich, tactile world of sonic phenomena.

Overtone singing (also called overtone chanting, harmonic or diphonic singing) is a vocal technique in which a single singer produces two clearly perceivable pitches at the same time: a low fundamental drone and a high, flute‑like melody formed from the harmonic series. By precisely shaping the vocal tract (tongue position, lip rounding, soft‑palate height, and jaw opening), the singer selectively amplifies individual overtones above a continuous drone. Regional styles include Tuvan and Mongolian khöömei (with substyles such as sygyt, khöömei, and kargyraa), as well as Tibetan Buddhist and other Inner/Central Asian chant practices. Modern practitioners also employ the technique in ambient, experimental, choral, and meditative music. Timbrally, overtone singing ranges from bright, whistling tones to deep, growling textures. Musically it often centers on drones, pentatonic figures, and melodies that trace the natural harmonic series rather than equal‑tempered scales.