Jonathan Rowe | May 5, 2021 - 11:43 am
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CREDIT: Bettmann / Contributor
Don’t let a century’s worth of pop culture fool you the best of the best barbershop quartets have five voices.
Sure, four striped-shirt, straw-hatted, bow-tied
bodies but five voices. The second tenor sets the stage with a lead melody line, which the first tenor lays a high harmony on. The baritone singer handles mid-range, while the bass, the deepest voice of the four, lays a solid foundation. But when the overtones of these four pitch-perfect voices unite and merge, an invisible fifth voice emerges from the ether, an everywhere-but-nowhere aural apparition not unlike the effect of Buddhist monks chanting in a massive ancient temple. This unified fifth-voice phenomenon is known as harmonic coincidence, though it is nowhere near a coincidence, accident or fluke.