My own inward journey with this phenomenon began in the early eighties, listening to the recorded soundtrack of "Meetings with Remarkable Men," the movie version of the autobiography of G. I. Gurdjieff, the central Asian mystic, teacher, and general rascal. On the album jacket the cut was labeled "Contest of the Ashokhs": this was the opening sequence of the movie, which was (allegedly) filmed on location in Afghanistan.  (As I've since learned, the actual singing was done by the remarkable David Hykes, whose á cappello recordings with the Harmonic Choir are hypnotic and simply astounding.)

Gurdjieff, as a young boy, was brought by his father to this context, held in a certain remote mountainous valley. Every twenty years, wandering musicians and storytellers would gather here to see who could produce a note of a particular quality. The judge of the contest was not a person, but the valley itself which would echo only a note of this particular quality! One at a time, instrumentalists and singers tried elaborate flourishes and incantations in obscure languages, with no success. At length, one man began to sing a certain note, with a rather odd tonal quality.  As he sustained this note, a higher note appeared as if by magic, ad began to shift up and down through an arpeggio! The singer's breath control was impressive, when he finally stopped, the valley faintly but clearly echoed the whole performance.

I was fascinated, but skeptical; surely this was a product of studio overdubbing. It wasn't physically possible for a human throat to produce two distinct notes simultaneously ...was it? (Note: the sample which may be downloaded from the frame to the lower right corner of this page has had some studio stuff added for dramatic effect, but this is NOT the source of the clear, high harmonics! To hear a really "clean" recording, try this sample.) Being blessed with a deaf landlady, I began to experiment with my voice in my spare time, using the "Meetings" recording as a model. Within a couple of weeks, I concluded that it was indeed possible; I could produce the "extra" note, though not yet with the clarity of the recorded ashokh.

 I was at that time reading Charles Williams book All Hallows' Eve for a class. All Hallows' Eve is a darkly brilliant Christian horror story about an evil sorcerer, who worked his darkest magic by means of something called the "reversed Tetragrammaton." The Tetragrammaton, explained the professor, referred to the four Hebrew letters used in the earliest of "Yahwistic" tradition to refer to the most sacred name of God: , or YHWH. 

    "The true pronunciation of this name is not known," said the professor, "but most modern scholars believe it was something like 'Yahweh.'" As I continued to practice the obscure vocal sounds required to produce the "extra" note, it dawned on me with a shock that what I was singing was very close to "Yahweh." At certain points in the continuum between the vowel sounds E (long E) and O (long O) the sound seemed to come alive. Was it possible that these sounds were somehow related to the God of the Hebrews?