The Whistling, Part 1

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the nature and history of human whistling – including the subject of whistled languages.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey are you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Your Mind? My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
and today we're going to be kicking off a multi
part series about whistling. This is one of those topics

(00:24):
I hope in in classic Stuff to Blow Your Mind fashion,
we will be able to really surprise you how much
weird and interesting stuff there is to learn about whistling
around the world. That's right, I mean we will. We
will make it weird. We will be weird in episode one,
so strap in. Yeah. So. One of the first things
that I wanted to talk about, and I think this

(00:45):
is something we'll have to revisit in multiple parts of
this series is the idea of whistled languages. Much to
my surprise after reading about this subject, there are multiple
examples from around the globe of whistled languages, or at
least whistled alternate versions of an existing spoken language and two.

(01:06):
So to kick us off, I wanted to talk about
one particular example of a whistled language. I was reading
about this in a classic linguistics paper from nineteen forty
eight by George M. Cowen called Maso Teco Whistle Speech.
This was published in the journal Language in nineteen forty eight. Uh.
It's by this scholar named George M. Cowan who lived

(01:28):
nineteen sixteen through seventeen. He was an expert on linguistics.
He was associated with the Summer Institute of Linguistics, and
apparently this paper is one of his most important contributions
to the field. So it's an article documenting this fascinating
type of communication practiced by the Mazo tech people living

(01:50):
in Wahaca, Mexico. So what we're talking about here is
an alternate form of the maze Teco language that is
based entirely on whistles. Cowen writes that as of the
nineteen forty Mexican Census, there were approximately sixty thou people
in the Mazatec tribe, and almost fifty six thousand of

(02:11):
them were mono lingual speakers of of the ma Azotecan languages.
The Mazotecan languages are part of what Cowen here calls
the Popa Loca Mezteco language family, so part of a
broader association of languages found in this area. So Cowen
spent several winters in the nineteen forties living among speakers
of the Mezoteken languages to document uh these languages and

(02:36):
eventually the whistle speech. And I want to begin by
reading an anecdote that he just observed during his time there. Quote.
Eusebio Martinez was observed one day standing in front of
his hut whistling to a man a considerable distance away.
The man was passing on the trail below, going to
market to sell a load of corn leaves, which he

(02:57):
was carrying. The man answered Eusebio's whist with a whistle.
The interchange was repeated several times with different whistles. Finally,
the man turned around, retraced his steps a short way,
and came up the footpath to U. CBO's hut. Without
saying a word, he dumped his load on the ground. U.
Sabio looked the load over, went into his hut, returned

(03:18):
with some money, and paid the man his price. The
man turned and left. Not a word had been spoken.
They had talked, bargained over the price, and come to
an agreement satisfactory to both parties, using only whistles as
a medium of communication. And this is not an isolated incident. Uh.
The author here writes that the Mazotec people frequently hold

(03:41):
entire conversations and express an extremely broad and versatile set
of ideas, all using whistles. As he puts it, quote,
the Maso Teco is frequently conversed by whistling to one another.
The whistles are not merely signals with limited semantic value,
arrived at by common agreement, but are parallel to spoken
conversations as a means of communication. And so to to

(04:05):
try to uh elucidate that a little bit, what this
means is that the whistle speech is not a code
like you may have heard, you may have seen in movies,
I don't know, like like soldiers crawling around and they
sort of like whistle codes at each other, And you
get the idea that maybe they've agreed on a handful
of whistled signals in advance, like you know that one

(04:26):
whistle means a stop, another one means go forward, And
but there's probably a very limited array of those whistles,
and you had to work on agreeing to them beforehand,
right right. Also in contrast to how the sort of
every day and in our world you will encounter. You know,
a handful of uses of whistles that have sort of
agreed upon meaning sort of a whistle that is an

(04:48):
attention grabber, and a whistle that might be a little
more scandalous, and then a whistle that is it seems
to say say whoa, uh, like that's a big truck
h something of that nature. But but it's not really,
it's nothing at all like a robust language of whistles.
It's just a few basic whistle signals that seem to

(05:08):
be commonly used. Yeah, that's right, I would say, Like
in the standard American English speaking context, there are a
few sort of significant whistles. You you basically know what
they mean when you hear them, but there's only a
handful of them, and you certainly can't make sentences out
of them. Exactly the opposite is true of the Mazo
Teco whistle speech. Uh. This is a a full equivalent

(05:31):
to the standard spoken Meso Teco language. The whistles can
be recorded and translated by anybody familiar with the whistle speech,
producing the same specific translations with a couple of uh,
certain kinds of ambiguities. I'll get into that later. So
it's not a kind of loose suggestive code. It's not
something that's to be agreed on ahead of time. It's

(05:54):
just an equivalent of a spoken language with all the
freedom of degrees of expression and lexical richness found in
the spoken language. And I thought this was just amazing.
So I guess I want to explore a few more
things that the Cowen documents that he observed about the
whistle speech during his time in Wahaka in the nineteen forties.

(06:14):
So he says also that um the mesa teco people
use the whistle signals when communicating with animals. For example,
there's a sort of slow up gliding whistle to keep
burrows moving when on the trail, or whistles to call
out to dogs. But these whistles don't have a translatable
language equivalent. So there is whistling that is language. But

(06:36):
then there's also a whole set of like whistle sounds
that are useful day to day but are not words. Yeah,
they just they want to be translated. They'd be like hey, yeah,
or keep walking, keep going another thing. Not everybody whistles,
and not everybody who whistles whistles the same amount. Cowen

(06:58):
writes that while everyone seems to have listening fluency with
the whistled speech, generally only men whistle, and especially men
between the ages of boyhood and middle age. So he
says old men rarely whistle conversationally. It seems to fade
out over the lifespan, and women and girls understand what

(07:21):
is whistled by the men and boys, but usually do
not whistle themselves. So he talks about observing a bunch
of interactions where like a boy would whistle something to
a girl his age, and the girl would reply with
spoken language, so she understands the whistles, but she doesn't
use them herself. He even talks about one specific example

(07:41):
of like a boy teasing a girl and he didn't
realize what was happening because he he just observed the
boy whistling. He didn't realize it was speech, and suddenly
the girl lashed out and hit the boy with the
broom because of what he'd been saying to her, except
he hadn't been using the spoken language. Interesting, Okay, so
the former we have perhaps a physical reason for the limit,

(08:04):
but possibly cultural, and then the second one seems to
be definitely cultural. Yeah, I don't know if there's a
if there's like a biological limitation on on older men
whistling either, I mean, it seems like this is probably
all cultural convention. Yeah. I think with older men, based
on what I've been reading, it would be it would
be kind of a case to case situation. You certainly
have older gentlemen who are profound whistlers, but there are

(08:27):
there's certainly cases even in younger people where if there
changes to one's mouth uh, due to injury, due to
just changes in dental health, then that could impact one's
ability to whistle. Well. So a big question here would
be why. I mean, this is an interesting and beautiful
thing about this language that it has the you know,
the spoken language and then it's whistled twin. But like,

(08:50):
what would cause a whistled version of a language to
develop like this? And I think one good way to
get some insight into that is to look at what
are the common occasions for people to use the whistled
version of their language instead of the spoken version. And
one of the big answers here is pretty clear. The
author here says that the most frequent use of the

(09:11):
whistle speech was observed when the speakers were at a
distance from each other, he writes quote. Men scattered widely
over a mountain side, each working in his own plot
of ground, will often talk to one another with whistles.
Travelers on the trails will keep in touch with one
another by whistling, though separated by considerable distance. When wishing

(09:33):
to call or get the attention of someone, even though
he be within easy speaking distance, the masa tecos will
often whistle his name. The village shoemaker often calls passers
by into his shop with a whistle to chat with
him while he works. A man may come to a
friend's hut on a visit. While approaching, or when he
has actually arrived at the door of the hut, he

(09:53):
will frequently whistle rather than call his friend's name. If
the friend is home, he may respond from within with
a whistle, then come out to greet his visitor, or
he may remain inside and whistle to his visitor to
come in. Fascinating Okay, so communicating at a distance seems
to be a big one, or also initiating communication at

(10:13):
the start of an encounter, which I think it's interesting
that even when we're not at a distance, we often
use language that we employ at a distance. Like to
get somebody in a spoken language. To get somebody's attention
from far away, what do you do? You yell hey
at them? But also what do you do when you
walk up and and see somebody you know, your two
feet away from them? You say, oh hey? And there

(10:34):
might be some sort of a wave or something in
there as well, And I could I can imagine, I
don't know if it so sure, I can imagine where
if whistling could maybe take the place of some of
the otherwise necessary waving or gesticulating that would be required
to get somebody's attention and say, hey here, I am,
there you are, let's converse right, So okay, So you've

(10:55):
got communicating at a distance, you've got initiating communication at
the start of a of a meeting, and then along
the same lines. Uh. He writes here that the whistle
is sometimes used as a warning, such as when someone
unknown is seen approaching on the trail, you kind of
whistle to let all of your friends nearby know that
something's up, you know, to get their attention. Though again

(11:15):
he says the most common occasion is talking at a distance,
and he writes that in these cases, men working in
the field seem to be able to communicate easily with
people a full quarter of a mile away, like on
the opposite mountain side using the whistle speech. But also
and I found I found this next part really interesting.
Count says that sometimes, especially boys will hold a whistle

(11:39):
conversation if they're trying to talk while older people are
also nearby carrying on a spoken conversation or even singing together.
And he calls these sort of simultaneous whistled conversations subdued
whistles and says that they're that they're quite audible, and
yet they are able to happen simultaneous lee without seeming

(12:01):
too much interfere with the spoken conversation of the adults.
And I don't know that one seems really interesting to me.
I mean, it reminds me of of being a kid
and wanting to talk to other kids while they're I
don't know, while you're in class or something, when you're
not supposed to be doing that. Uh, And and there
there's just an obvious sort of clash between two sets

(12:22):
of spoken words going on at the same time. And
this gets the ire of the adults, not only because
you're not paying attention, but because you're distracting others. Yet
somehow I could imagine that. Yeah, maybe having like a
different form of the language. If you're speaking your language
based on whistles instead of with the normal of phonetic syllables,

(12:43):
that could allow a kind of simultaneity without so much conflict. Yeah,
a way to speak while the adults are speaking without
interfering with what they're doing. Now, the example of of
using the whistles to communicate saying, in the case of
a path, uh, you're in the woods, someone's coming. That
reminds me that I And I'm making an assumption here,

(13:04):
But if one were to say, hey, Carl, there's somebody
coming and call out, well, not only are communicating to Carl,
but you're communing communicating something about yourself. I wonder if
whistling language in specific scenarios like this allow you to
communicate without tipping your hand at all regarding like who

(13:25):
you are, like what your age is, what your gender is,
et cetera. Oh huh, that I didn't think about that.
That's interesting. Um. Well, another thing I would say along
those same lines is, again I haven't done experiments to
confirm this, but I would just say, as a baseline,
I might assume that whistling can more easily blend in
with nature than than spoken language. That like you hear

(13:48):
spoken language, you instantly know a person is nearby you
hear a little whistle. I don't know that could be
a bird or something like that if you're not tuned
into it as a linguistic signal. And I think that's
where and that's certainly where my assumption come comes into play,
is that I'm not sure what it would be like
for someone who who has lived in the world of

(14:08):
this kind of whistling. If you're used to it, then
maybe you just you have heightened susceptibility to recognizing it
and and telling the difference between it in the natural world.
And likewise, perhaps if you're used to it, you can
definitely tell the difference between a man's whistling a boy's
whistle than well. So to round out the things that

(14:32):
the Cowen talks about in this article, he says, um uh,
that there are no lexical limitations on the whistle speech.
Sort of already got to this, but basically anything you
can express in spoken language you can express in the whistles.
Um However, there are some ambiguities caused by the whistle speech,
and this is because of the basic phonetic features of it.

(14:55):
So the massive Taken languages are tonal languages. This would
mean they're similar to like Mandarin, where you can have
a syllable and you can have maybe four different versions
of that syllable, and in English they would all be
the same syllable to us, Like maybe the classic example
in Mandarin is four different ways of saying ma, but

(15:17):
pronounced in each case with a different tone, So you
would you know, and if you're trying to write them
out phonetically in English, they would all be m A.
But one might be a kind of gliding up tone
and one is a falling tone and so forth. Yeah, well,
them as a taken languages are like this too. They
have tones in the speech, and the tones are what

(15:39):
eventually becomes the whistle speech. The whistle speech is based
on the tonal features of the spoken language. But if
you have, say, two different phrases that in the spoken
language have the exact same sequences of tones, these can
of course cause ambiguity in the whistle speech, and that
has to be resolved. You might have to say, what

(16:00):
do you mean? Uh. Colin writes that one of the
most common sources of ambiguity and whistled speech is just
proper names, because there are a lot of proper names
that have the same sequence of tones. But despite this
limitation that you know, you you don't have spoken syllables,
you're just turning the language entirely into sequences of tones. Uh.
You can communicate a lot, and most of the time

(16:20):
people understand each other just fine. Another thing I thought
was interesting is that he says there don't appear to
be any limitations on whistled speech mingling with spoken language.
Like it's not like you go into one mode and
then you're supposed to stay there and back and forth,
and like he says that a conversation might start at
a distance as whistles as whistles, and then switch to

(16:41):
normal speech when the parties get closer to each other,
or you might just go back and forth. You might
be speaking and then suddenly whistling, and then and so forth. Interesting. This, um, this,
this is not not a perfect comparison, but I and
I can't help but think of the astro mac droids
and star Wars. You know, how they speak with the

(17:02):
kind of whistling UM language uh and and generally when
they're talking to somebody like Luke Skywalker or whoever, Luke
understands the astro Mec language and then speaks back in
English and UH or whatever we're calling English UM in
the Star Wars universe. And at times when I'm watching this,

(17:22):
I'm always I'll stop and I'll think. And of course
i'm you know, caught up in the flow of it,
so it ultimately doesn't matter. But if I'm over analyzing it,
I'm I'm thinking about the fact that they're they're speaking
in two different languages to each other and there doesn't
seem to be any problem. But an example like this
from the real world makes me think, well, no, this
is entirely believable. You have both parties know the language,

(17:44):
but the astro Mec of course can only speak one
of those languages, and Luke Skywalker can also only speak
one of those languages, but both can understand. Yeah, that's interesting.
I have often thought about that too, about the how
exactly the R two D two communication goes on um
a boat. But I just wanted to say also that
like um, this isn't something of the past that the

(18:04):
Massa teco whistle speech is still in use today, certainly
by people in Wahaka and maybe elsewhere as well. If
you want to hear what it sounds like, I would
highly recommend looking up videos. There are videos you can
find online of native speakers demonstrating the Messa teco whistle
speech and it's it's it's totally worth looking up. Absolutely yeah,
it's it's. It's quite beautiful. But as I alluded to earlier,

(18:27):
this is not the only case in the world. This
is just one example I picked. There are other examples
and I might get into them in in part two
of this series of whistled languages popping up, especially it
seems in in mountainous and forested regions around the world.
And there's a paper I want to talk about in
the next part of the series about what are some

(18:48):
of the common features that may cause whistled versions of
languages to arise. It's very interesting to think about, like
what are the pressures and environmental characteristics that tend to
give rise to certain characteristics of language. Absolutely now in
discussing whistling here uh. When we first started looking into

(19:10):
this topic, I was thinking, well, what is whistling and
I at first I was thinking, well, this has to
be one of those questions that shouldn't be too complicated, right,
in part because for many of us, a whistle is
literally as close as our own breath. We can produce
a whistle without giving it too much thought, and we
can generally pick out the sound of whistling rather easily.

(19:32):
Maybe not, you know, as as quickly as we were
discussing in our previous example compared to other things. But
here it for a second, and you'll say, yeah, yeah,
somebody's whistling, and then maybe you can pick out the tune.
But yeah, we know it when we hear it, and
we know it when we produce it. So I honestly
expected to kind of springboard past the basic what is
a whistle question here and so get more into some

(19:54):
of the meteor stuff. But then I read this definition
of whistling from the paper The Physiology of Oral Whistling
by A. Zola at All, published in the Journal of
Applied Physiology. Quote. Experimental models support the hypothesis that the
sound in human whistling is generated by a helm Holtz resonator,

(20:15):
suggesting that the oral cavity acts as a resonant chamber
bounded by two orifices, posteriorly by raising the tongue to
the hard palate and anteriorly by pursed lips. So I
don't know about you, but when I heard that that
instantly it made me realize, Okay, it's a little more
complicated than I had perhaps realized at first. And uh,

(20:39):
I I don't think I had actually heard of a
helm Holtz resonator before, and when I heard that, I
instantly thought of like the Holtzman effect in Dune. But
this has nothing to do with personal shields and suspensers. Well, yeah,
I think that's interesting too, that it's like not a
fully settled question how exactly the physics of of whistling work.
But I do think it's clear and you can sort

(21:00):
of test this in your own body. Uh. That part
of what's happening with whistling is you are relocating the
primary resonating chamber that's producing the vibrations the sound when
you whistle, as opposed to when you produce regular speech.
Because if you just feel it in your body while
you're talking, you can kind of feel least I can

(21:22):
that the vibrations sort of seemed to be coming from
the throat. It's also sort of happening in the mouth
a little bit um. But then when you whistle, at
least what I feel is I feel the vibration beginning
in my mouth. Yeah. I would certainly advise everyone as
you're whistling, and you may be whistling right now, to
sort of test this out, like, really focus in on

(21:43):
how it feels, Focus on how you feel the air
flowing through your mouth. You'll find these lateral air passages
between cheek and molars. Uh. And it's it's really quite
quite fascinating because again, it's easy to just take this
for granted, it's not something for most of us. Is
certainly after after a point, you don't really have to
think about it. You don't have to have to look

(22:04):
up and read instructions for how to do it. You
just your mouth assumes the form necessary to create the whistle,
and you whistle as a total sidetrack. I'm sorry, but
I I found the title of that paper, The Physiology
of Oral Whistling, very funny because it immediately made me think,
are there other types of whistle? Is there ocular whistling? Well? There,

(22:26):
I mean, I guess there may be some sort of
nasal variety. I mean, I'm instantly reminded of the various
nasal flutes that exist in different cultures. So, uh, the
airflow from the mouth is not the only way that
we have to produce a sound. So um. But yeah,
when you say whistling, you tend to think oral whistling. Now,
I want to come back to the Helmholtz resonator here.

(22:48):
So this is named for important German physicist and physician
Herman von Helmholtz, who lived eighteen twenty one through If
you if you're studying anything about sound and sound generation,
you'll generally find out find something about von Helmholtz. For instance,
after we had started this particular topic, I was in Asheville,

(23:10):
North Carolina, and I went to the mog Museum there,
the synthesizer Museum, and Helmholtz his name comes up in
some of the materials there because it's just it's hard
to avoid him when you get into the science of sound.
So the helm Holtz resonator is a kind of spherical
chamber with an aperture at the top or at one
end called the nipple, and tapering there for insertion into

(23:32):
the ear, and then has another larger aperture on the
other end of this sphere. So each Helmholtz resonator has
a known fixed volume size and therefore is made to
pick up on a particular tone there there there's no
mechanical parts in this. It's essentially it's kind of like
a very finely engineered seashell. Pick one up. You place

(23:55):
the nipple in your ear, and you can pick out
a particular frequency, and you generally will have a selection
of these to analyze complex sounds. Joe, for your benefit,
I included a photo here of various helm Holtz resonators,
and if you do a Google search out there of
helm Halt resonators, you'll see selections like this. They're often
made out of some sort of metal. You know. I

(24:17):
think of myself as an adventurous secret of of experiences.
But somehow I don't want to put the big ones
of these in my ear. That just I would fear
I would fear oral injury. Well, the nipples the same
size on all of them. Okay, nipple that is inserted
into your ear. I guess I'm just I guess what
I mean is I'm afraid it looks like it would

(24:39):
suddenly produce an incredibly loud sound. But I guess the
size of the resonator cavity is not actually about the volume,
but about the pitch. So these resonators, they have various
applications in engineering, architecture, and music. But when it comes
to studying and describing the mechanisms of human whistling, something
that the aforementioned authors say isn't done enough, and again
it is not made fully understood. The Helmholtz resonator is

(25:02):
apparently a good model of what seems to be going
on inside of our head, inside of our you know,
our head and face when we whistle. And Joe I
included an illustration from that paper that I thought was
was very useful. This kind of takes uh the airflow,
those lateral air passages were described, describing the as well

(25:23):
as the central resonance chamber, and illustrates those inside of
this This drawing of of of of a human female
who is supposedly whistling, and it makes whistling look like
some sort of strange organ inside the mouth. Yeah, it
looks like, well, you've got your regular liver down below,
and then you've got your whistling liver, and that's up
somewhere underneath the nose. Right now, going back to that

(25:47):
paper by A. Zola at All, I want to read
this quick quote that sums a lot of this up quote.
The results of this study indicate that the acoustic mechanism
in human pursed lip whistling follows a Helmholtz resonator model.
The oral cavity acts as the resonant chamber, and the
anterior posterior movements of the tongue play a major role

(26:07):
in changing the volume and thus the whistle frequency produced
for their studies, performed with high resolution measurements may help
elucidate the contribution of changes to other parameters of the
Helmholtz equation. Okay, so this is sort of in line
with what I was at least guessing based on the
feelings inside my head. When I whistle, it feels like

(26:30):
the vibrations are coming from the mouth when I whistle.
And here they're saying that, yes, when you whistle, the
oral cavity is what's acting as the resonant chamber. It's
sort of acting as a Helmholtz resonator, right, And it
is stressing though that, Yeah, there's a lot going on here.
And even though it may feel pretty natural for most
of us to whistle, we don't have to again put
a lot of thought into it. Uh though though if

(26:52):
you may be overthinking it now and finding yourself having
to to think more about doing it, but uh, you
still have to have the proper preusit prerequisites in place. Uh.
Some people lack the ability to whistle for a few
different reasons. It's also something that does have to be
initially learned and can get really good with practice. So uh,
it's like it's one of those scenarios like when you

(27:13):
hear somebody do it really well. Uh, it has an
almost otherworldly beauty to it. Uh. Some of those uh
examples earlier in the whistling speech definitely have this quality
to them. But also I think of whistling used in
music sometimes I think of the whistling of say, Leon
Redbone whistle during some of his performance so amazing whistler.

(27:34):
My whistle is nothing like that, um And and a
large part of that just may simply be practiced. I
I have not applied the hours of whistling that Leon
Redbone applied during his lifetime to achieve that that level
of art. Thank so off, Mike, we were talking about

(27:55):
our favorite examples of music that features whistling. One example
that immediately comes to my mind is there's a there's
a great Bolivian folk song called Orando ce Foe and
the band, the experimental rock band Sun City Girls do
a cover of that song. I think their cover is

(28:16):
called the Shining Path, and there's a part usually before
the lyrics come in that I think on earlier recordings
of this song is done on a flute, but they
whistle this part, and the whistling is just intense. It
sounds very much the comparison a lot of people seem
to make. I think Seth said the same thing when
we played it for him earlier, is that it feels
like Ennio Morricone feels like a kind of a very dramatic,

(28:38):
dangerous Western scene. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, there's something about the
the West cinematically that that makes me think of whistling,
And a big part of it is, you know, probably
uh Morricone scores, but also the score by Carter Burwell
for um A Raising Arizona, the Colin Brothers film, So good,

(29:00):
fabulous score that includes a lot of like yodeling and banjo,
but also whistling, really powerful, like pure whistling that sounds
like it's from just it's from straight from heaven. But
the other one Seth reminded, uh, reminded me of was
the Peter Bjorn and John song that was popular. I
think that was like really big my last year in college.

(29:20):
It was like two thousand eight or so. Yeah, yeah,
that's a great example. Another one that I think Seth
and I both thought of at the same time was
Otis Redding sitting on the dock of the bay. That
is a wonderful whistling part in it. Well, you know,
I was trying to think, based on all these examples
we just brought up, whether there are sort of common
connotations to whistling in music. But I guess not really

(29:41):
because in some of these examples we've talked about, the
whistling feels very very happy and languid. It's a relaxed
kind of sound. I think of sitting on the dock
of the bay, whereas in uh, in the first example
I mentioned, it's it's a fiery, intense, you know, uh,
danger rising from from the canyon kind of sound. Yeah. Yeah,

(30:02):
I'm glancing at a list right now, and oh this
is a big one. Winds of Change by the Scorpions.
That's some that's some powerful whistling in there. Feel it,
Feel it in your bones. Golden Years by David Bowie.
That's another good one. Games Without Frontiers by Peter Gabriel.
Oh I know that one. Yeah, Yeah, that's a great one.
War Without Tears. Yeah. Yeah. They're a bunch of them.

(30:25):
And I'm not going to go through this whole list,
but I'd love to hear from folks out there if
you have particularly favored examples of songs with whistling in them,
or or favorite whistling performers. Oh like, here's another great one.
Always Look on the bright Side of Life from Monty
Python's The Life of Brian. Great stuff. There's walk Like

(30:46):
in Egyptian by the Bengals. I did not remember the
whistling in that. Yeah, don't worry, be happy. Bobby McFerrin. Oh,
I don't know if I remember the I remember this song,
but I don't remember whistling Me and Julio down by
the schoolyard Paul Simon. Oh yeah, uh uh, I shouldn't
do that too much. Love is a Battlefield Pat Benatar,

(31:08):
great song. Uh, I don't remember the whistling, you know,
coming back to the idea of whistled language is part
of me, thinks, Oh, man, I it would be difficult
for me living in a culture like that because I
feel like I don't whistle very well. But then again,
I guess it's a it's a skill that you develop
with practice, like other language skills, and that unless you
have some kind of like anatomical reason that's interfering with

(31:32):
your ability to whistle. And imagine it's largely a function
of how much you do it, how much you you
practice it, and how much you learned at an early age.
But but yes, I am one of those who I
don't whistle great. Uh Yeah, my whistling is it's okay
for my own purposes, but it is not a performance
level whistle. So I will catch myself occasionally whistling a

(31:52):
particular tune. But I'm also just as just as inclined
to maybe sing a little bit from a particular song,
or to hum a little bit, uh did to use
those more or less in tandem. But pure whistling. Yeah,
I've never really applied myself to it, uh, because because

(32:13):
I felt like my whistling, yeah, it's good enough for me,
not so much for anybody else I'm around. I did
get into a habit a while back of when I
would be singing a song and I would start getting
up to the high notes that I couldn't sing, I
would just switch to whistling them. Yeah, as we were
researching this, I was, of course, like a lot of
you out there listening to the episode, I was a

(32:33):
little I was hyper conscious of my own whistling, so
I was I was trying it out, and I and
I decided, well, what if I tried to whistle better,
or you know, what have I? What have I sort
of really concentrate on it and try and see what
happens when I change the shape of my mouth a
little bit. And I was feeling that. I found that
I was able to make a stronger whistle, but it

(32:56):
was also I felt it straining, uh, like muscles in
my face and in my head that I maybe don't
strain that much when I do my default whistle. And
then I was able to go back to my default
whistle and it felt more natural. So I kind of
took that as an indicators like, Okay, this is this
is kind of a gateway to better whistling. If I
wanted to actually pursue this probably, but I'm not going

(33:19):
to do that. Oh well, uh, this makes me think
of how Actually, to some degree, the same thing is
true about spoken language. Like I find at least if
I think too hard about what my body is doing
while I'm producing words with my mouth, suddenly they become
a lot harder to produce. Like if I'm thinking about
my lungs and my larynx and my mouth. Uh, the

(33:41):
syllables become kind of strange. You get that. Actually, I
would say it's a feeling kind of similar to semantic satiation,
where when you say a word too many times in
a row, you start like the words starts to feel
strange and it loses its association with the with the
with the meaning that it signifies. Uh. In a way,
it's kind of like if you're riding a bicycle and

(34:04):
you suddenly start thinking really hard about how you were
riding the bicycle, how this is being retained, and maybe
don't do that, Maybe just just just ride the bicycle,
think about something else, because everything is in motion, it's
it's working. Just don't don't second guess it. But as
we were saying, though, it's by second guessing it that
we are able to potentially improve it as well. Um,

(34:26):
we can certainly fall into a habit of whistling a
certain way. Uh, and then there are conceivably ways to
improve upon that whistle. But uh, you've got to want
to do that or have some reason to do that.
And certainly communication would be a big one. If you're
engaging in some sort of whistling communication with people, then
there's going to be sort of a whistling standard. I
imagine you're gonna you're gonna hear other people use it,

(34:48):
and there is going to be a positive social pressure
to improving your whistle to match the whistles of those
around your right. Well, maybe we need to call part
one of Whistling series here, but we've got so much
more interesting stuff to talk about in subsequent parts. We're
going to talk about religious uses of whistling. We're going

(35:08):
to talk about whistling superstition, whistling psychology, whistling technology. That
there are a lot of monsters in this closet. All right,
we'll join us for that when we come back, and
certainly go ahead and send in your messages regarding your
own experience with whistling. We would love to hear from
you as a reminder. Stuff to Blow your minds Core
episodes published Tuesdays and Thursdays and the Stuff to Blow

(35:30):
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(35:54):
to the Discord. If you're a Discord user, go to
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lot of cool discussions going on there and they're doing
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some of the listeners have decided to read um Burder
Echo is the name of the Rose. So if you're
interested in that email, let's get the link. We'll send
you to the right place and you can join up

(36:15):
with them. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio
producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get
in touch with us with feedback on this episode or
any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or
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at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to

(36:39):
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(37:03):
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