The Lost Art Of Whistling (2)
Visitors to La Gomera and El Hierro in Spain’s Canary Island chain can still hear the local inhabitants, particularly shepherds, communicating with each other in Silbo, a whistled version of Spanish, across mountain valleys that would otherwise take hours to cross. It is one of the last vestiges of a more widespread practice with some eighty traditional cultures worldwide, mainly found in mountainous terrain or dense jungle, using whistled versions of their local language. They do so for a very good reason.
Reaching 120 decibels, louder than a car horn, and with a frequency range of between 1 to 4 kHz, well above the pitch of most ambient noise, whistled speech can carry up to ten times further than the spoken or shouted word, according to research published by Julien Meyer in the Annual Review of Linguistics (2021).
We distinguish one speech sound, known as a phenome, from another through detecting slight variances in their sound frequency. A vowel such as a long “e”, Meyer explains, is formed higher in the mouth than a long “o” and these complex changes in timbre are easily replicated in a whistle. Similarly with consonants, a “t”, for example, being richer in high frequencies than a “k”, giving the sounds a different timbre, and there are subtle differences in the tongue’s movement, distinctions that can be captured by varying the pitch and articulation of a whistle.
Learning to whistle your native language, he claims, is relatively straightforward, a group of students mastering the technique to achieve fluency both in communicating and understanding whistled Spanish within eight months. However, it only works successfully in non-tonal languages, where pitch is not crucial to the word’s meaning.
Most European languages, including English, are non-tonal, but in tonal languages, such as Chinese, the meaning of a sound depends on its pitch relative to the rest of the sentence. Unlike whistling which does not use the vocal cords, tonal speech deploys them to make the pitch modulations that form the tones while the front of the mouth makes most of the vowel and consonant sounds. To whistle a tonal language, the whistler can only mimic the tones or the vowels and consonants, not both, thus losing much of the nuance of the language.
Whistling in the street or at the workplace was commonplace during the 19th and much of the 20th centuries. Often it conveyed a sense of jauntiness, even nonchalance, someone who was at the ease with the world but could also mask a degree of nervousness, the whistler summoning up the courage to face a tricky situation, or bravado which would be missing in a face-to-face encounter, such as the wolf whistle. For Jiminy Cricket in Disney’s Pinocchio (1940) it was a cure for a moral failing, his advice being to “take the straight and narrow path and if you start to slide – give a little whistle”. It is claimed to be a great stress-reliever and strengthens the lungs.
For the auditor, though, it could be profoundly irksome, especially if it was out of tune or goes on for a long time. Some employers, like Henry Ford, sought to ban it from the factory floor, making whistling an act of defiance against the forces of capitalism. Nowadays, though, I struggle to remember the last time that I heard someone whistle in the street.
Opinion seems to be divided as to why this should be the case. Some commentators suggest that it is simply an indictment of popular music’s inability to turn out memorable melodies, earworms that simply demand replication. Others claim that whistlers have finally got the message that it is no longer socially acceptable to whistle in public.
The truth, perhaps, is simpler. Public whistling has become another victim of the digital revolution. We are able to cocoon ourselves in our own little world, staring zombie-like at a little screen, oblivious to our surroundings, or listen to music of our choice at the swipe of a finger or conduct a telephonic conversation, practices equally as annoying in their own right to those around us as whistling once was.
Pockets of resistance can still be found, there is even a World Whistlers Convention held in Japan, but the heyday of the whistler seems to be over. Truly, a case of o tempora, o mores.
