You know how sometimes you are doing something and your mind wanders? Happens to me all the time, and I wake up to find that I’m thinking about something kind of odd, or something in an odd way. Today, it was whistling.
I’ve been listening to my Sly & the Family Stone CD lately, and I found myself whistling along with the horn part on Take You Higher. And I started to think about whistling.
Where do we learn to whistle? I mean, have you ever really paid attention to what you do, physically, when you whistle? Try it, find some music that is fairly complicated: fast paced and also containing high and low notes pretty close together, and whistle it. Hallelujah Chorus. Try to whistle that.
It is a pretty exact science, isn’t it? You don’t just move your lips to pucker, and you don’t just move your tongue to form the notes, and you don’t just move your jaw to get the right amount of air movement. You do it all at the same time so quickly and in such a specific way that I can’t imagine how we could have learned to do it.
Seriously, how did you learn to move all those things at the same time to form one note and then not even a full second later do it all again to form another totally different note? How did we learn this??
Is it learned? Did you seriously do enough whistling as a kid to learn how to do this? Or is it innate? Physics? Like when you catch a ball in mid-air when you only saw it a split second before, but your brain could do those wind-speed, travel-arc, incredibly detailed calculations that put your hand JUST SO to catch that ball.
Is that what whistling is?
1 comment:
I was thinking about this the other day myself thinking how the minutest change in muscle tone in the pucker our lips combined with air flow changes the pitch of the sound. Wow. Then our brains recall a tune and we whistle to it but doing the above. That's pretty sophisticated I think.
I remember trying to learn to whistle as a child and then getting it. It took a lot of practice. Now it's a piece of cake. But I never did learn to do that fingers-in-mouth whistle.
Another question brought on by yours, do any other of the apes whistle?
I remember trying to learn to go cross-eyed too, but I could never see for sure, even in the mirror, so I just lumped it.
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