Les Contes d'Hoffmann ♪ "Les Oiseaux dans la Charmille"

Les Contes d'Hoffmann
Offenbach

"Les Oiseaux dans la Charmille"

Kathleen Kim

Production: Bartlett Sher. Conductor: James Levine. 

Taken from the 2009 Live in HD transmission.

Comments

Carmel Pule:

Being an Engineer, while I am enjoying listening to the singing,  I am also appreciating this from a technical and a scientific  and mathematical angle. She is singing some connected notes where she moves from one note to the other relatively slowly with no gaps of silence in between and so she can feel and mentally weigh  the note and adjust or tune  it to project the right frequency, but she is also singing many many unconnected bursts of frequencies  which are emerging so quickly  from silence into the right frequency, and I find that is remarkable. Every oscillator which I built in my life has a starting transient before it settles down where every component state adjusts itself according. But starting an oscillator very quickly and expect it to settle at the right frequency, almost instantaneously, is almost impossible in electronic  circuits even if the oscillator is crystal controlled. Mathematically there are many extra generated frequencies in  a burst of  a particular note. Actually it is infinity in theory.

Yet here is this young woman, preceding  the note with perfect silence then generating the right note almost instantaneously  That means that with her mental power,  she is silently and  consciously adjusting the state of her larynx, her tongue, her teeth and pressure in her lungs  and then she let it all go instantaneously to  generate the note, and yet there is very little transient notes being generated. How does she know beforehand that the right note is coming our?

Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier who was a French mathematician and physicist born in Auxerre and best known for initiating the investigation of Fourier series and their applications to problems of  vibrations hence frequency analyses   he would also be surprised of the mental power of this singer how she mentally  prepares  all the necessary  singing  human components in a split second and knows that the right note will emerge.

Remarkable indeed.  

Add all this to the sense of humour being projected, this singing  is very enjoyable from many angles, including its mathematics and the engineering in winding her up occasionally !!!

Helena Williams

+ Carmel Pulé -  Extraordinary simplification on the aspect of mathematics and physics hidden in the arts and in the human performance.  Yes, life itself is composed of mathematic and chemical elements.  Everything is in motion and evolving from a

 beginning to the final stage of decay. I  guess that is the secret beauty of our planet earth, the cosmos and Humans.  Thank you  so much for a wonderful lesson.

Patricia JANEČKOVÁ
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