Tuvan Throat Singing (Khoomei)

Tuvan and Mongolian throat singing, most widely known by the Tuvan term khoomei, is a vocal technique that allows a single singer to produce two audible pitches at once, a sustained low fundamental tone and one or more clear, whistle-like higher overtones shaped by precise adjustments of the tongue, throat and mouth cavity, several distinct styles of which, including sygyt, kargyraa and khoomei proper, are individually named and recognized within Tuvan tradition according to differences in vocal technique and resulting timbre.

Practitioners and scholars widely connect the tradition's origin and continued practice to the pastoral, herding way of life historically dominant across Tuva, Mongolia and neighboring regions of Siberia, describing throat singing as developed partly in imitation of and response to natural sounds encountered across the open steppe, including wind moving across grassland, running water, and the calls of animals such as horses, a connection singers and teachers frequently describe as central to understanding the practice's meaning rather than as incidental inspiration. The technique demands years of practice to develop reliable control, and it is taught and transmitted both within families and pastoral communities where it has long been practiced and, increasingly since the later twentieth century, through formal ensembles and dedicated teachers responding to substantial international interest in the tradition.

Throat singing developed within Siberian and Mongolian pastoral and shamanic religious contexts, and in several regional traditions it carries a recognized connection to indigenous shamanic practice, understood by some practitioners as a vocal technique capable of connecting the singer to specific places, natural features or associated spirits, a framing distinct from, though not always sharply separated from, its parallel identity as a widely appreciated secular folk art form performed for entertainment and competition.

During the Soviet period, state policy toward religious and shamanic practice across Siberia and Mongolia was frequently repressive, and throat singing's more explicitly shamanic or spiritual associations were in some contexts downplayed or suppressed even where the vocal technique itself continued to be performed and transmitted as folk music, a pattern that has complicated later efforts to fully reconstruct how uniformly the practice was understood as spiritually significant across different communities before that disruption. Since the late twentieth century, following greater openness in the region and substantial international scholarly and popular interest, throat singing has undergone a significant revival and gained wide international recognition, including UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage listing for Mongolian khoomei specifically, a recognition that has supported renewed attention to the practice's religious and shamanic dimensions alongside its now well-established identity as a celebrated folk and concert art form.