Pipes
Whistling is the production of sound with the help of air that flows quickly through a cavity with a small opening, creating turbulence there. The person can use different methods produce out of his mouth whistling, which he for musical and operation and in some cases for communications uses. Other living beings besides humans also use whistling for communication.
The brief utterance of a whistle is called a whistle . A whistle can also be given from an artificial pipe . Take the referee's whistle in sports as an example . Other examples are whistles from the whistles of locomotives and ships or sounds generated by compressed air in machines.
Human whistling methods
Labial whistling (lip whistling)
In this well-known and most common whistling method, the lips are shaped into a small O. The tip of the tongue is slightly rolled and pushed back against the lower lip for higher notes, and moved further back and down for lower notes. When air is expelled or sucked in, air eddies form in this area. The oral cavity acts as a Helmholtz resonator . By slightly changing the positions of the tongue and the lower jaw , the frequency and thus the height of the sound can be regulated, the volume (intensity) is controlled by the strength of the sucking or blowing. The vocal folds in the larynx are not involved in sound generation.
Labial whistling is the best physically understood method. Already John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh (1842–1919) recognized in his work Theory of Sound (1894–1896) that the sound cannot be created by vibrating the lips by trying to insert a wooden tube that is not capable of vibrations between himself pressed his lips and was able to whistle because of this.
Only comparatively low volumes can be generated when whistling lips. The achievable frequency spectrum normally extends over about two octaves . Labial whistling is fundamentally different from other whistling methods in that it is the only method that also works with aspirating air.
Fingerless, non-labial whistling
With non-labial whistling, the whistling sound does not come from the lips, but further inside in the area of the tongue, teeth and hard palate. The lips are not primarily involved and therefore do not have to be shaped into a tight O. They are opened relatively relaxed, so that the whistling is almost "invisible".
In one of several methods, the tip of the tongue is pressed against the edge of the upper incisors, while the rather wide-spread lips close to the incisors leave a narrow opening through which the air can flow out. Alternatively, you can place your tongue against the hard palate and only release a narrow opening (an air channel) through which the whistling sound is generated.
Another method, which is more difficult to learn, is to bring the tongue into a stable position (similar to whistling with fingers) and expel the air with a strong force. The volume is similar to that of finger whistling. One advantage of these methods is that you don't have to put your fingers in your mouth and you can keep your hands free.
The two-part whistling (for example in the third interval) of just one whistle requires a high level of artistry and good training. The tongue is stretched out towards the mouth, leaving a space between the tongue and the corner of the mouth on both sides. The air flow goes through the teeth and the tones are varied by tension of the cheek and tongue.
Whistle on fingers
Whistles can be generated with the help of two fingers (index and middle finger, index finger and thumb) or by using two and two fingers in pairs (index and middle fingers together, ring and little fingers together) after a lot of training by doing together With a suitable position of the tongue, two narrow gaps are created for the sharply expelled breath.
One possibility is to shape the thumb and forefinger of one hand into a ring, to push the tongue from below, to the back, to the top with the lips half open and finally to exhale forcefully through the opening. Care must be taken that no air escapes between the fingers and the corners of the mouth.
Four-finger whistling is done on the same principle, shifting the tongue in a similar way with both index and middle fingers. These fingers thus fulfill the same function as two fingers formed into a ring. However, the four-finger method is a little easier.
Whistles can also be generated with just one finger. This enables extremely loud whistling, sounds with a volume of over 100 dB (A) are possible without any problems.
Physics of whistling
Two physical prerequisites must be met in order for a whistling sound to occur: You need a fast-flowing, vortex- forming air stream . This interacts with a resonator space, and an acoustic oscillation is created, the whistling sound. This is a practically pure sine wave. For this reason, frequency (pitch) and intensity (volume) are the only parameters that the whistle can influence. In contrast to the use of the human voice , the tone color cannot be varied when whistling, which greatly limits the possibility of information transmission.
Of the human whistling methods, only physicists researched labial whistling more closely. In 1947 Gierke compared human whistling tones with those of a perforated tone arrangement and came to the conclusion that the same mechanism is responsible for both phenomena. Periodic eddies are formed on the lips, which stimulate the pharynx to vibrate naturally. In particular, Gierke was able to explain that the whistling tone becomes higher if the speed of the air flow is increased by blowing more strongly while the lower jaw and tongue remain in a fixed position.
A similar result was apparently independent of Wilson et al. (1970), who also found that human whistling - apart from details - is analogous to the sounds of decoy devices such as Rayleigh's bird call or the hunter call , which fall under the aforementioned punched tone arrangements. They emphasized the existence of two vortex-forming constrictions, one of which forms the lips and the other forms the tongue placed on the roof of the mouth.
The remaining whistling methods presented have so far not aroused the interest of physicists. In their work on whistled languages, Busnel and Classe put forward the hypothesis that the common explanation of the numerous whistling methods with and without fingers is that the most complicated channel possible is formed with the help of the tongue or fingers in which the rapid air flow creates turbulence. As with lip whistling, the eddies interact with the oral cavity, which acts as a resonator, to produce the whistling sound.
Human whistling tones are roughly in the range of 1300 to 4000 Hz . Because the sensitivity of the human ear is greatest in this frequency range and the sound wave is sinusoidal and therefore as simple as possible, whistling tones are perceived better than other tones generated by the voice, for example. This is why whistles are used to command others or to give them signals.
History of human whistling
It can be assumed that whistling as a means of non-verbal communication is as old as humanity. In this way, people will be able to communicate over long distances early on by means of whistling sounds and warn of dangers. A first written mention can be found in the Bible in Isa 5,26 LUT , where it says: He will set up a standard for the people in the distance and whistle them from the end of the earth. Even if it is difficult to distinguish between hissing and whistling in many sources (both sounds were designated by the same word in the languages of antiquity), the context often makes it clear what is meant. It was already common in antiquity to whistle to others : Cicero boasted in 61 BC. BC in a letter to Atticus that he received an ovation at games without taking a whistle ( sine ulla pastoricia fistula ). Even if there are indications of this in some sources, it cannot be definitively determined whether it was customary in ancient times to whistle melodies.
Whistling has always had a secular character, and so the tradition of artificial whistling did not emerge until the Renaissance . At a time when most musical instruments were still in the development stage, whistling was a serious alternative to singing. However, this changed over time, and by the high baroque the art of whistling had lost so much importance to the chamber orchestra that it had lost so much importance in society Events no longer occurred and soon assumed the role it still fills today. It is the role of a marginal phenomenon, a curiosity with a slightly exotic character and not that of an art.
In many cultures, whistling was and is associated with magic and superstition . Whistling sounds should be able to attract or drive out demons, depending on the situation. Whistling was also associated with the devil , which is why it was designated as unclean and prohibited in some Christian and Islamic areas. The Italian composer Arrigo Boito lets the devil whistle instead of sing in his opera Mefistofele . It was often a taboo for women to whistle in public. The saying "girls who whistle and chickens that crows should be turned their necks" is still known today.
The belief in many mines that whistling brings bad luck underground has a good reason: until the invention of the safety pit lamp, canaries were used to measure the air quality in mines for centuries . On the one hand, their nature makes them particularly suitable for constantly whistling ("singing") melodies, which they were additionally trained for their task, on the other hand, birds are generally much more sensitive to a lack of oxygen than humans. So as long as the bird was whistling and trilling underground, the air was okay too, if he stopped for a longer time everyone would be aware, the little guy fluttered off the pole, the miners started (with him as an indicator where the Air got better again) on the way up, the bird was even dead in the cage, it was high time to leave the shaft as quickly as possible. The careless whistling of a man's ditty could have brought death to everyone, because it could easily have been confused with the "singing" of the canary , especially with the constant noise of the hammers on site , and the buddies in the deceitful security of the approaching emergency weighed that there was still enough oxygen available. So it was inevitably reserved for the little bird to whistle.
Even on ships, especially sailing ships, it was - and still is in some cases today - forbidden to whistle, because the boatswains only convey certain commands through the whistle - secretly they once again expected a stiff breeze from whistling in the wind.
A superstition that is still very widespread today is that whistling, from whomever, brings bad luck to the theater , opera or concert stages - including vaudeville and circus . According to a legend, it comes from the time when gas or oil lamps were still used. When the fuel in these lamps ran out, they produced - by drawing air from the wicks - a rising whistling hissing sound, so the lighting technicians knew which lamp to look after. Human whistling could have led to greater chaos in the rehearsal or performance process (terrible in a classical concert , a drama , a revue , unthinkable with "flying" artists or even with animals). This problem has not existed for a long time, but it is still frowned upon on stages all over the world, because there are in reality two arguments against it: First, who whistles is not focused on his task and does not belong in the “Holy of Holies”, that is, on a stage, in a stage space (this also includes the lower stage and Schnürboden ) or in a big top . Second is the theater always a trauma, the public might at the premiere the piece boo , here says the superstition: "If caught in the samples is also refereed at the premiere." In the film and television studios , as well as on Film set , the “no-whistle rule” was adopted by the theater worldwide, primarily because of the (most logical) argument of a lack of concentration and motivation during rehearsals and shooting. That can actually go as far as expulsion.
The whistling on fingers can reach volumes that are uncomfortable for the human ear. Not least because of this, whistling is often seen as impolite in public, a notable exception are the whistles to the Sports Palace Waltz at the Berlin Six-Day Race, "invented" in the 1920s by a Berlin original called a crutch . The waltz therefore quickly became the anthem of this cycling event and the characteristic fourfold whistle with the fingers is still "performed" with great joy by hundreds of spectators at a certain point in the piece of music.
When men whistle after women, it is considered an obscene gesture. The African American Emmett Till was even murdered by her husband and half-brother in 1955 after whistling after a white woman.
The American professor Charles G. Shaw found in 1931 in the New York Times that whistling was an "unmistakable mark of the debauchery" and that no great and successful man ever whistled. However, in many situations most people whistle melodies on their own. Often this means that the whistle is in a happy to exuberant mood, but whistling in the dark can also encourage courage or suppress the feeling of loneliness. In cartoons in particular, characters whistle who plan maliciously and want to appear innocent.
Whistled languages
An understanding by whistling is known from many parts of the world. Almost all of these areas are mountainous, sparsely populated and have little infrastructure, so that whistling makes it possible to communicate over distances that would otherwise only take a great deal of time. Often times, shepherds are the first porters of this type of communication.
Whistling languages are not a substitute for spoken languages, but complement them. Because very young (and also old) people are unable to whistle due to lack of teeth, whistled languages are learned years after the mother tongue. Whistling languages are therefore based on the respective idiom of the region.
The best-known and best-researched example of a whistled communication is El Silbo , which was probably once used for communication on all the Canary Islands and is now only cultivated on La Gomera , where it has been a subject in schools for years. Thanks to the sound-reflecting effect of the mountain walls, communication is possible over distances of up to 10 kilometers that cannot be bridged with shouts or shouts. Since El Silbo threatened to go under, interested parties made great efforts from the 1980s onwards not to let this form of communication and art fall into oblivion.
Whistling languages usually only occur locally and are limited to a small area, sometimes only to a single village. Scientifically investigated whistling languages are found in the French Pyrenean village of Aas , in the area around Kuşköy (Turkey), among the Mazatecs in Mexico and the Chinese Bai in the Yunnan region .
In Africa some ethnic groups communicate with whistled languages, but use self-made pipes as an aid.
Whistling languages exist in both tonal and non-tonal forms. In almost all of the examples, fingers are used as an aid, as this enables greater volume levels to be achieved and greater distances to be bridged. The voice is usually still used for normal short-range conversations, the whistling language is only used when it is needed. The Mazateco Indians are an exception, who whistle labially and use the quieter tones in normal private conversations.
With the advance of modern telecommunication technologies and the infrastructural development of increasingly remote areas, the whistle languages are deprived of their livelihood, the necessity of communication over great distances. As a result, many whistling languages are no longer passed on to the following generations and are threatened with extinction or have already died out.
Whistle in music
Artificial pipes
The range of the human whistle is more limited than it is through the use of the vocal cords (" singing "). In addition, the variability is severely limited by the impossibility of adding timbre to the voice.
The concertante polyphonic whistling is extremely difficult. Even people of high musicality are usually less precise when whistling than when singing. Examples of concert whistling can be found in the repertoire of the Comedian Harmonists with the song Can you whistle, Johanna , but this also shows the limits of polyphonic, concert whistling.
There is, however, a modern tradition of professional art pipers , especially in English-speaking countries . In the late 19th century, Alice Shaw , known as the Whistling Prima donna , gained great popularity in the United States with her whistling skills. After the invention of sound recording by Thomas Alva Edison and Emile Berliner , the popularity of artificial whistle solos was also made use of by the first phonogram manufacturers from around 1890: human whistling was technically much easier to reproduce than singing; that is why the first phonograph cylinder and record catalogs contain numerous artificial whistle lectures. Some of the interpreters of this time achieved international fame, including above all the Berlin variety artist Guido Gialdini , whose whistling repertoire ranged from humorous effects to classical music and was marketed worldwide on the records and rollers of numerous manufacturers. Probably the best known and most successful art piper of the 20th century is the American Fred Lowery , whose Indian Love Call record sold a million times in the 1940s.
The actress Ilse Werner was also known for her whistling , who often enriched her stage appearances with extensive rehearsals of her whistling art. In 1967 Whistling Jack Smith landed a top five hit in Great Britain and Germany with I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman . Even Roger Whittaker had with whistles success, so with the Mexican Whistler . With Lips von Lipstrill , the last professional female art piper from Austria died in 2005. The Belgian singer, guitarist, parodist and entertainer Bobbejaan was also an art piper. Not to be forgotten is Ennio Morricone, who built whistled melodies into his film scores in the first Italo-Westerns (For a Fistfull of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More) , apparently believing that "lonesome cowboys" whistle in their loneliness. In several pieces of music, the whistled motif became the signature melody for the respective character (Cheyennes theme for Jason Robarts in Once upon a Time in the West, S. Leone).
Well-known examples of whistle interludes in recent pop music can be heard on Wind of Change (Scorpions) or Always Look on the Bright Side of Life by Monty Python.
Musical instruments
From a physical point of view, many musical instruments are also based on whistling. The classic instrument for this is the pipe organ , which is also known as the “queen of instruments” due to the variety of tone colors that can be produced using pipes, the pitch range (from almost inaudible low 16 or 20 Hertz up to 20 kHz, which is again inaudible to humans) and the volume of the room that can be sounded with an organ.
Other examples of the sound generation of so-called “labial instruments” (with “lips”) are the flute , clarinet and oboe : if you look closely, their sounds are whistled. The oboe and clarinet, however, have vibrating bodies with their tongues . Tin Whistles , , stalk , pipe and horn pipes wear appropriate name.
Whistling in the wildlife
Animals often use pipes for communication.
One might suspect the twittering of birds as the closest example . From a physical point of view, however, this is not a whistle. Birds produce their song in the vocal head ( syrinx ), where they produce sounds by vibrating elastic membranes, which is more similar to that of the human vocal folds in terms of the production mechanism . Since the pure, sinusoidal sound waves of some birds could not be explained satisfactorily with this, Gaunt et al. 1982 hypothesized that a whistling sound would not be produced by vibrating membranes but by rapidly flowing, vortex-forming air. However, this hypothesis has not been confirmed by experiments (e.g.), so according to the current state of research, birds do not whistle. Despite the different methods of production, the fact that birdsong is very similar to whistling sounds is undisputed. It is the cause of the naming of the subfamily of Whistling Ducks , the widgeon and the Turkish village Kuşköy ( Vogelsdorf , see above ).
The sounds that bats use to orient themselves in the ultrasonic range by evaluating the return sound with sonar are also not whistling tones in the narrower sense .
Other animals which are named after the whistling which they emit are the tundra swan ( Cygnus columbianus ) belonging to the owls moths belonging "Whistling Moth" ( Hecatesia thyridion ), the Antilles leptodactylidae ( Eleutherodactylus johnstonei ) and the parotomys (English also "Whistling Rats") ( Parotomys ).
Marmots communicate with each other with whistling tones. As with the chamois , whistles serve to announce danger.
Even whales and other marine mammals use whistles to communicate. The dolphins' whistling, in particular, piqued the interest of many researchers, considering the possibility that the animals might have developed a natural language. Whether that is the case is still unclear (see also whale song ).
In isolated cases, the whistling has also been observed in captive apes, for example in the orangutans Bonnie in the Washington Zoo and Ujian in Heidelberg.
Artificial pipes
Whistling tones can also be generated artificially. An obvious example is the whistle . In artificial pipes (which also include musical instruments, see above), the sound is principally generated by splitting a stream of air through a sharp edge or a similar obstacle, creating eddies which, in conjunction with a resonator chamber, generate the sound wave.
Many people are familiar with the compressed air pipes of ships or the steam pipes of locomotives . They aren't the loudest whistles yet, however. There are warning whistles on slopes above dams to warn in the event of impending flooding due to the dam wall breaking. Such an extremely powerful compressed air whistle stood, for example, at the level of the hairline near Günne above the dam of the Möhne dam . This whistle was supposed to be heard as far as Unna or Dortmund, which corresponds to a distance of over 50 kilometers. It was installed to prevent the possible consequences of a disaster such as the one that occurred in 1943 after the bombing and the break of the dam.
Dog whistles for commanding dogs are also available as ultrasonic whistles that are inaudible to humans, as the dog has a wider hearing range than humans.
The boatswain's whistle has been used on English sailors to pass orders to the crew since the 13th century.
Dog whistles
Whistle
Boatswain's whistle
Steam whistle of a light rail locomotive
Old police whistle
See also
literature
- René-Guy Bussel, André Classe: Whistled Languages. Springer, Berlin 1976. ISBN 3-540-07713-8
- M. Carreiras et al: Neural processing of a whistled language. in: Nature . London 433.2005, p. 31. ISSN 0028-0836
- Henning von Gierke: About the whistling tones produced with the mouth. in: Pflüger's archive. Springer, Berlin 249.1947, pp. 307-312. ISSN 0031-6768
- TA Wilson, GS Beavers et al: Experiments on the Fluid Mechanics of Whistling. in: Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Melville 50.1971, 366. ISSN 0001-4966
- AV van Stekelenburg: Whistling in Antiquity. in: acroterion. Stellenbosch 45.2000, pp. 65–74.
- PF Ostwald: When people whistle. in: Language and Speech. London 2.1959.3, pp. 137-145. ISSN 0023-8309
- JWS Lord Rayleigh: The Theory of Sound. Vol. 2. Cambridge 1896 (2nd ed.), Dover, New York 1945, 1969 (repr.), P. 224. ISBN 0-486-60292-3
Web links
- International Philharmonic Society for the Art of Whistling (which was "founded to research the application of human whistling in musical art and to establish artistic standards of whistling performance, training and literature that are equivalent to other instrumental traditions.")
- Julien Meyer: Bioacoustics of human whistled languages . (Overview of whistling languages with bibliography, English)
- MP3 archive with recordings of artificial whistles
Remarks
- ↑ From this derived the further meaning “trick”, for example in Pfiffikus and smart , which is attributed to the bird's whistle. Friedrich Kluge , Alfred Götze : Etymological dictionary of the German language . 20th edition. Edited by Walther Mitzka . De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1967; Reprint (“21st unchanged edition”) ibid 1975, ISBN 3-11-005709-3 , p. 543 f.
- ↑ AS Gaunt include: Syringeal mechanics reassessed, evidence from Streptopelia. in: Auk. Washington 99.1982, pp. 474-494. ISSN 0004-8038
- ↑ MR Ballintijn, CT Cate: Sound production in the collared dove, a test of the 'whistle' hypothesis. in: Journal of Experimental Biology. Cambridge 201.1998, pp. 1637-1649. ISSN 0022-0949
