The Whistling, Part 2

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 (00:00):
My Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of
My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick,
and we're back with part two of our series on whistling.

(00:22):
In the last episode, we talked a bit about how
whistling works physically, what happens when you're creating a sort
of resonator cavity within the mouth. We also talked about
the whistle speech of the Maze Taco languages in Wahaka
in Mexico, and I wanted to start off today's episode
by talking about some other examples of whistled languages and

(00:46):
some of the common characteristics between them, because, of course,
the Maze Teco whistle speech is not the only example
of a whistled language that carries information. In fact, I
was looking at a paper by an author named Julian
Meyer called Environmental and Linguistic Typology of Whistled Languages in
the Annual Review of Linguistics. It's a very recent paper,

(01:10):
uh And according to Meyer, there are reports of more
than eighty languages around the world that contain a whistled lexicon,
and about half of those have been confirmed by formal
studies and published recordings, so really solid documentation of at
least forty or so whistled languages around the world, And

(01:32):
so I think it's worth mentioning a few more examples
of these and describing how they work and seeing what
we can compare and contrast with them. So one example
I was reading about was in a really interesting article
in BBC Travel by Elliott Stein, and the story here
goes like this. In Greece, there is a remote mountain

(01:55):
village called Antia, which is found on the southern an
eastern coast of the Greek island of Evia in the
Aegean c And within this village there has long been
a whistle based language called Sphyria, which allows speakers to
communicate across great distances, and it seems to have been

(02:17):
passed down from parents to children among the shepherds and
the farmers of the village for literally thousands of years,
for more than two thousand years to read from Stein
here quote. But in the last few decades, antias population
has dwindled from two hundred and fifty to thirty seven,
and as older whistlers lose their teeth, many can no

(02:38):
longer sound sphery as Sharp notes today there are only
six people left on the planet who can still speak
this unspoken language. Now this was five years ago as
of this recording, so I don't know how that number
six has changed since then. There there are descriptions of
some efforts to try to teach it to more people. Um,

(02:59):
but of whenever you're talking about a language with that
few speakers, it it's certainly extremely endangered. In fact, this
is considered one of the most endangered languages in the world. Now.
Apparently the existence of this language sphery A here was
not documented anywhere in the outside world until the year

(03:19):
nineteen sixty nine, when a plane crashed in the mountains
nearby and there was a rescue team that was attempting
to locate the pilot and they reported hearing strange, melodious
whistling echoing through the hillsides. And this led to investigation
and brought the language to the attention of the media
and to academics. Uh So, a big question here is

(03:42):
where does a language like this come from. Linguists do
seem to agree that it dates back to ancient times.
It's been around for a long time, but exactly how
it was created is less certain, uh and apparently local
legends abound. So one story I came across this was
described in in some detail in a documentary piece on

(04:04):
PBS News Hour that was about Sphyria, and it claimed
that the language was invented about two thousand five years ago,
not by Greeks, but by Persians after they were defeated
at the Battle of Salamis. So Salamus was a battle
in four a d b c. During the Persian invasion

(04:25):
of Greece under zerk Sees the Great, and so Salamus
was a It was a naval battle where the coalition
of Greek city states was able to fight off and
defeat the larger Persian allied fleet. And I think this
is widely considered the battle, or one of the battles
that turned the tide of the war in favor of
the Greek defenders and pushed back the Persian invasion. But anyway,

(04:48):
the legend about the whistle speech goes that the Persian
survivors of the battle I guess they were, you know,
their their ship was sank or defeated in some way
and they managed to swim to shore on the island
of Evia, where they had to survive hiding in the
mountains inhabited by hostile native Greeks, and one way they

(05:09):
avoided detection was by coming up with a way of
speaking in whistles that would sound just like the birds,
so they could they could communicate with each other, but
their speech would not be intelligible and in many ways
would probably not even be detected. But that that story
has a kind of legendary quality. I'm not sure how
much there is behind that so, but but it's a

(05:30):
great story nonetheless, and and steinsite some other local legends
as well. Some residents believe it was invented during the
Byzantine Empire by locals who wanted a secret way to
communicate that would elude the understanding of pirates and people
from hostile nearby villages. And so a common theme here
seems to be the idea that somehow this language was
created to be a secret way of communicating, to allow

(05:53):
the locals to communicate across distance and understand each other
without other people detecting or understanding what they were saying. Now,
the author of this BBC Travel piece describes visiting the
village and spending time with with the handful of people
there who still use the whistle language, and they apparently
use it in many of the same scenarios described in

(06:15):
that paper on the Massa Teco whistle speech that I
talked about in the last episode, A big scenario of
you seems to be communicating across great distance on the
mountain side and sort of greeting or summoning people from
far away. And Stein cites a Greek linguist named Demitra

(06:36):
Hanggen who studies Spheria, and she says that Sphoria is
in some sense a whistled version of spoken Greek, where
specific whistled tones correspond to specific phonetic syllables or letters,
and you can build words out of them. Now, again,
this is another way that it's similar to the Massa

(06:57):
Teco example, because in both cases the wistled language is
not like an uh totally independent, unique language. Instead, it
is in some way adapting an existing spoken language two whistles,
and of course that would lean us more towards the
Greek origin story as opposed to the Persian one. Yeah,
I thought about that, but I don't know if it

(07:19):
actually informs that one way or another. But yeah, I
had the same intuition at least. So one of the
most remarkable things about Sphyria, again similar to the mesa
Teco whistle speech example, is that it is intelligible at
a great distance. You can understand messages in Sphyria up
to about four kilometers away on this mountainous terrain, which

(07:43):
Hangen says is about ten times farther than you can
usually understand speech, loud speech or shouting. And I saw
that number of the ten times distance multiplier mentioned in
other sources, such as a Cambridge University press paper that
I looked at. But there's a great part in this
article where Stein quotes a local shop owner named Maria Kafalas,

(08:06):
who tells a story about some of the like the
social opportunities offered by the whistle speech. And so her
story goes like this quote. One night a man was
in the mountains with his sheep when it started snowing.
He knew that somewhere deep in the mountains there was
a beautiful girl from Antia with her goats. So he
found a cave, built a fire and whistled to her

(08:29):
to come keep warm. She did, and that's how my
parents fell in love. Well, that is a better ending
than something like and then the descendants of of of
Persian soldiers slaughtered him in the woods, so I will
say that much. Yeah, and then the Greeks finally came
for revenge. Yeah. I continue to just have a lot

(08:50):
of questions about the Persian origin theory. It just seems
like it seems and I could I could be missing
something major here, but it seems like it begs more
questions than it answers. Well. Yeah, as as I said,
it sounds more like legend to me than like an
strongly evidence based explanation. I agree, away from being a
full blown ghost story. But but so I've described two

(09:14):
examples here of whistled language in detail, and as I
mentioned before, there are many others around the globe. There
are something like eighty ish that have been reported somewhere
around forty of them are very well documented. So an
obvious question to ask is what do these languages have
in common? What causes a whistled language to arise? So

(09:37):
I was looking at a few sources here. One of
them is that paper in the Annual Review of Linguistics
by Julian Meyer already mentioned. Another is a an article
in Smithsonian magazine from one by Bob Holmes, which cites
that paper and summarizes some other research in this area,
for example, focusing on a whistled variant of Spanish that

(10:00):
is used in the Canary Islands, on the mountainous islands
of Lagomera and Elierro in uh they're both in the
Canary Islands. And that paper by Julian Meyer tries to
gather together all of these languages and say, okay, are
there common topic, graphical or or sort of geographical features

(10:21):
that these languages tend to have in common? And he
finds yes, indeed there are almost all of the whistled
languages occur in two different types of environments, either in
mountainous terrains rugged mountains, or in dense vegetation like dense
forest or dense savannah. So why would it be those

(10:42):
two places, mountains or in dense vegetation. Well, to focus
on mountains first, Myer writes that in mountainous terrain, settlements
and the people living in the mountainous terrain tend to
be much more scattered across larger distances that are more
difficult to travel verse quickly than people in other types

(11:03):
of topographical settings. So uh here, so Meyer writes quote
in Aliero and Lagomera, in the Canary Islands, in the
region around kush Koy in Turkey, in the High Altars,
or in the Pyrenees near the village of Os two points,
only five dred meters apart can easily represent an hour

(11:23):
in walking time. Thus, whistled forms of languages serve as
soon as the spoken forms become ineffective between forty and
a hundred meters. Depending on terrain, whistles can be heard
up to seven kilometers away in some valleys. Okay, So
the idea here is that in mountainous terrain you have

(11:43):
the problem of people are often situated farther apart from
each other, and those distances to cross are difficult to cross.
They take a long time. So if you need to
communicate actually coming to be close enough together that you
could understand each other by shouting, would that's along? That's
a big time investment. So it's actually worth your time

(12:04):
to learn a whistle speech that will carry better across
longer distances and save you all of that climbing and
walking time. Now, what about the forests or the dense vegetation. Well,
here Myer writes quote the vegetation in dense tropical forests
and savannah's restricts visual contact and limits the propagation of sound.

(12:25):
In such contexts, Whistled speech frequencies are also well shielded
against acoustic energy loss due to reverberation, which is particularly
important in densely vegetated environments because the whistled frequencies belong
to the most favorable frequency window, ranging from one to
three kiloherts, within which reverberation in forests varies less with distance.

(12:50):
In dense vegetation, whistled language facilitates the coordination of individuals
during group movements, especially during hunting and fishing. Whistling all
so allows human dialogue to go undetected by animals, blending
in with natural sounds, since many animal species also use whistling.
Other advantages are that whistles are easy to locate and

(13:12):
difficult for strangers to recognize, especially other tribes, even those
that speak different dialects of the same language. Whistled communications
are used for distances from about ten ms up to
five hundred meters, depending on the density of vegetation. Okay,
so there are a lot of advantages in the forest
or thick savannah. So the idea is that, of course

(13:35):
whistling speech allows you to communicate without being able to
see each other. Sidelines are limited by the by the
vegetation itself. But also whistling just carries better in the forest.
It it propagates better through the forest without being drowned
out by the sort of the the reverberation effects of
having all that foliage there. Uh. And it also seems

(13:58):
to pierce through and and sound much better. And Holmes
also summarizes uh some of these advantages of whistling in
in the Smithsonian paper, saying that if you're good at whistling,
and you've been practicing this all your life, sometimes you
can reach a hundred and twenty decibels with a whistle,
which is loud. That's like uh. He compares it to

(14:20):
a car horn and says it's actually louder than a
car horn. Um, and that whistles pack almost all of
that energy into the perfect frequency range, the most piercing
frequency range, which Holmes says is between one to four
killer hurts. Meyer said between one to three killer hurts.
But it's roughly the same space um, which Holmes says

(14:41):
is above the pitch of most ambient noise. And this
is interesting because I was thinking about, um, why do
we keep noticing that whistling sounds, the ones made by
humans are similar to birds song. Well, one thing that
occurs to me here is that Earth's song is probably

(15:01):
shaped by natural selection to propagate through vegetation and to
cut through ambient noise from the environment so so as
to be clear, you know, to be clear and audible
at a distance where maybe a potential mate could hear it.
So whistle speech probably sounds like birds song, having similar
frequency ranges because similar forces are shaping them. In the

(15:22):
case of birds, it would be evolution, and in the
case of humans, it would be people intentionally selecting whatever
noise they are able to make with their bodies that
is the clearest at the longest distance, cutting through ambient noise,
and and losing the least energy to reverberation in the forest.
And that just happens to be the whistle that sounds

(15:43):
like a bird. Yeah, yeah, this this is interesting to
think think about it. On one hand, I'm a quiet whistler.
My whistler, my whistle was not very loud, and therefore
it can be a little surprising when I encounter someone
who has a very loud whistle, and you reminded just
how loud and whistle can be. So that's important to
factor into all of this. And uh. And another connection

(16:06):
that came up in some of the research I was
doing was that you you end up encountering this whole
realm of of non linguistic sounds that humans can make
that can be used to communicate ideas or to to
gain attention, etcetera. And you you also see things like
yodeling thrown in there. Yodeling um also an art form

(16:31):
if you will, or a performance are to sound that
developed that also had to do with communicating or calling
animals or or communicating with other herdsmen across across long
distances in the wild. When you're trying to speak normal
phonemes like we're using in words here, I think a
lot of that information probably easily gets lost to the distance.

(16:51):
Like you might be able to hear that somebody is shouting,
but you can't hear the difference between consonants. Are they
making a T sound or a case sound like I
don't know at a distance that that kind of all disappears.
But if you're if you're judging more on sequences of pitches,
then suddenly the confusion created by distance is reduced. Yeah. Yeah,

(17:13):
just just yelling doesn't necessarily cut it, right, because if
you can't, if you're particular words are not going to
be overheard, then you might end up having to do
something like just some sort of rhythmic barking. And if
you're doing some sort of rhythmic barking, well why not
further develop that and get somewhere and get to somewhere
where it is yodeling or you shift over into a

(17:34):
whistling uh, and that develops into some sort of a
whistling language. So yeah, it's just the more you look
at it, the more since it makes for this kind
of purpose than Now, another thing going on with whistled
languages is that, um, most of them, perhaps all of them,

(17:54):
but I'm not sure about that. So I'm going to
say at least the vast majority of whistled languages appear
to be not wholly independent languages of their own, but
whistled versions of spoken languages. So this was true of
all the examples I've talked about before. You know, the
maze Teco whistle speech was a whistled variant of the

(18:15):
tonal meze Teco language. Spherria appears to be a whistled
system for encoding spoken Greek. The whistle speech system of
the Canary Islands, called sill Bo, is a whistled version
of Spanish, and so forth, and for this reason, one
of the main differences in whistled languages appears to be
whether they are encoding a tonal language or a non

(18:38):
tonal language, and based on that distinction, the encoding process
is different. Tonal languages tend to be whistled in a
way that preserves the tones of the spoken words, and
in the last episode we talked about tonal languages. Tonal
languages where you know the syllables of the words, also
carry information based on the tone you use when speaking them.

(19:01):
So say like a high, high pitched version of the
syllable MA means something different than a lower pitched version
of the syllable MA, or an up gliding tone on
that syllable, and so forth, like the tone of the
syllable actually makes a difference. Uh, non tonal languages are
not like so in in English, we we don't encode
much information into the tones of syllables. It's just like,

(19:23):
what are the vowels and consonants. Yeah, the tone can
contain some information, but not nearly to the to the
extent that you find in true tonal languages. Right. No,
it's not not lexical information, more like, uh, maybe sort
of contextual mood information or inflection. Like the difference between

(19:44):
saying I would like you to walk the dog and
I would like you to walk the dog. Well, that
implies that maybe something the last time the dog was
walked it was not it was not good enough, or
it was or maybe you ran the dog, you know,
like that, that sort of thing. But it doesn't change
the actual yeah, uh information contained in the word. No,

(20:06):
it's more like about the implied information about the attitude
of the speakers, or I need you to walk the dog.
Maybe you didn't walk the actual dog. Maybe you took
some other creature or item from the house with you
on the walk instead. Okay, so you've got a tonal
language and you want to make a whistled version of
that you In most cases, it seems like you preserve

(20:27):
the tones of the spoken words. Non tonal languages that
have whistled speech tend to involve a sort of approximation
of consonants and vowels, and the Homes article I mentioned
quotes the scholar Julian Meyer explaining that we already use
subtle differences in frequencies to distinguish between spoken phonemes, like

(20:51):
the differences between certain vowels and consonants. Uh So, think
about the vowels E and O. A long E vowel
sound has a higher pitch than along O vowel sound,
and if you say them back to back, you can
listen to the descending melody of those vowel sounds EO
E O, And in fact, though it's harder to hear

(21:12):
at first, the same is sort of true of consonants,
like a T sound contains more high frequencies than a
K sound, and these differences can to some extent be
reproduced in whistles and uh So, the discussion of this
in the article got me thinking about, even without having

(21:32):
an established version of a language like this, and without
any training, can you sort of attempt to whistle English
phrases and have people understand what you're saying. In some
cases you can. And I actually tried this out with
my wife Rachel before we recorded here, I, Uh, this
was a kind of weird exercise, but I was like, hey,
can you tell what I'm saying here? And so I

(21:54):
tried things like um, which she took a minute on
but decided I was saying hello, nice to meet you,
which is what I was trying to say. Uh, So
that one worked a few other phrases I tried did
not work as well, But the ones that really seemed
to work immediately were the ones where it was phrases

(22:18):
she had heard me say before, especially when I tried
to whistle, common phrases that we use with our dog,
so um immediately she heard as all buddy um. And
I think this ties into something we've talked about on
the show before, the exaggerated musicality that humans tend to

(22:40):
use when speaking to babies and pets for some reason. Uh,
there may be evolutionary reasons for this, that we when
we speak to cute things that need our care and attention,
you know, babies or pets as kind of it might
be creepy to think about them this way, but in
to some extent kind of psychologically sir at babies, um,

(23:01):
that we we speak with an exaggerated musicality or tonal
variation that we don't use when speaking to adults, and
that stereotyped phrases within this kind of highly musical speech
are much easier to recognize when you try to whistle
them instead of say them phonetically. So are you gonna
keep whistling? Have you? Was it? Was it a big

(23:23):
enough success? Oh? No, I think that would be a
horrible idea. Also, strangely, the dog did not seem to
get it. So when when I whistled all buddy Rachel
could tell what I was saying, but but Charlie did
not seem affected. I tried whistling to my cat whilst
researching information for for these episodes, and yes, you didn't care.

(23:45):
And my wife was like, like you, you can't speak
to a cat and whistles. You have to use the
kissy sound. That's what they understand. That's what that's the
language they speak. It is known. But the kissy sound clicks,
I mean, these are all these are not too far
are removed from whistling. Some of these these types of
sounds will come up again later on. Indeed. Now, one

(24:06):
of the most interesting lines of thought emerging from all
this is that some experts think that studying whistled languages
might help us understand the origin of human language as
a whole, because again, some linguists think that these whistled
languages could be similar to the first languages that probably

(24:27):
emerged in human evolution. Now why on earth would that be? Well,
a couple of thoughts here. One. I just want to
rate a passage from the Holmes article in Smithsonian quote.
One of the big challenges for of language is the
need to control the vocal chords to make the full
range of speech sounds. None of our closest relatives, the

(24:48):
great apes, have developed such control, but whistling maybe an
easier first step. Indeed, a few orangutans and zoos have
been observed to imitate zoo employee is whistling as they work.
When scientists tested one ape under controlled conditions, the animal
was indeed able to mimic sequences of several whistles. Okay,

(25:10):
so that's one line of evidence. Seems that our closest
biological relatives are better able to imitate and reproduce sequences
of whistled tones than they are to imitate and reproduce
vocal phonemes like we make with speech. But There's another similarity.
What is whistled speech especially good for it's communicating across distance,

(25:32):
and as I mentioned earlier, especially in the densely vegetated
contexts for hunting and fishing. And in these cases some
but not all, of course, but some whistled languages tend
to rely more on kind of formulaic sentences like you know,
go that way, go toward it, etcetera, than than on

(25:52):
like full lexical representation, which is also commonly thought to
be how languages first emerged. That there were probably stereotyped signals,
you know, a sort of more limited range of signals
and ideas that you could express with sound that carried
common meanings, before there was like a complete and endlessly

(26:13):
variable lexicon where you could make a sentence meaning anything. However,
I think it's important to point out that even if
it's true that these whistled languages might have some things
in common with the earliest proto languages, that does not
mean that today's whistled languages are descended from any hypothetical
whistled proto languages, Because if there were whistled proto languages,

(26:37):
they long ago turned into speech, and then you know,
many thousands of years passed, and then that speech in
some cases transformed back into a whistled variant. Yeah so, so,
sort of imagining like just the basic sounds one could
make and how one might draw from that palette to
communicate things. Some of those sounds become encoded, many of

(26:59):
those sounds of at all those things. They evolve into
more complicated forms. But then we we never completely forget,
we never completely abandon these other modes of of of
auditory communication, that the palette remains there for us to
dip back into. Yeah. Yeah so. One last common feature
of these whistled languages is that in basically all cases,

(27:22):
with maybe a couple of exceptions, their uses declining. Most
of them are disappearing, And so we might wonder why, well, uh,
several causes are cited in in the homes article. One
is strangely roads, you tend to find whistle speech only
in places that are very remote, uh, And that apparently
the presence of well paved roads tends to cause whistle

(27:46):
speech to fall into disuse. Now you can imagine that
could be for a couple of reasons. One could be
well paved roads to a place increase the connection of
that place to the rest of the world, So just
sort of uh in the same way that sort of
connection to global culture would cause the would tend to
cause the disuse of all types of local customs, and

(28:08):
so the whistle speech would just be one of them.
But another reason I could think of is that, like
we were saying earlier, a lot of the use for
whistle speech tends to be communicating across distances that are
difficult or time consuming to traverse. And if you make
it easier to get from place to place in a
shorter amount a shorter amount of time, there's probably just

(28:29):
less incentive to whistle across great distances. Yeah. Yeah, I
also imagine that it's it's quite useful in communicating with
the not yet seen. So if you're if you're having
to travel traverse a distance and there are no roads involved,
there's no reasonably fast travel, there's going to come a
point where you're approaching somebody and maybe you can't even

(28:50):
see them yet, and it might be nice to just
sort of check in with them, uh into like and
and the mere fact that they can they can speak
the whistle language like gives you an amount of information
on top of anything they provided in via the whistling. Yeah.
Another hypothesized explanation for the decline of whistle speech, especially

(29:10):
in places maybe like Brazil and Central Africa densely vegetated areas,
is that deforestation seems to be playing a role in
eliminating it, but mainly by eliminating one of the types
of environmental pressure that tends to motivate its use in
the first place, which is the need to coordinate um

(29:30):
hunting and other survival subsistence activities within thick forest. Remember
the motivations, the sort of bioacoustic motivations we talked about earlier.
But despite these pressures, these languages don't have to disappear.
I was reading about that there are efforts in some
places to UH, to like set aside special attention and
care to preserve them. I believe in the Canary Islands

(29:53):
the whistle speech is like is to some extent being
taught in schools to to help preserve it. And obviously
that could be uh could be instituted in other areas
as well. Yeah, that's that's great. I mean, it's wonderful
that there are these these efforts to keep it alive
because of course, once once a language is no longer
properly spoken. It becomes so much harder to bring it back.

(30:16):
Not to say that it can't be, but you know,
but but clearly, like holding onto languages, keeping them alive
are important even and even when they are not, uh,
you know, the traditional spoken languages, but they are these
whistling tongues than However, despite all this talk we've been

(30:40):
using about how whistles can be used just like speech
to encode mundane information, to just transmit information between people,
there's another way of understanding whistling. One that goes I
think way back and you know it's been around, uh
since ancient times, that whistling is also it has a

(31:00):
kind of power, and that whistling is different than normal speech,
and that in many ways it may be kind of
divine or may have a may bring a magical danger
with it. Yeah. This, if you've listened to everything we've
discussed so far, you might you might be inclined to think, well,
whistling sometimes we do it, sometimes it's useful, but that's it.

(31:21):
We never have any additional values added to it. It's
never infernal or celestial, it's never vulgar or or or
anything of that nature. But of course this is this
is far from from the truth. Uh, there's this deep
well across pretty much every culture here we can look
to where whistling has some sort of added meaning. It

(31:43):
takes on various supernatural tones, and some of these will
will get into more in the next episode. But I
wanted to dive in sort of almost really just go
right to the deep end and dive into this subject
of transcendental whistling, particularly Chinese transcendental is whistling. But this
is a topic that also has connections to some other areas.

(32:07):
So uh, this should this should be a fun journey
will take and then again come back in later and
discuss uh some more examples of whistling and Chinese culture
um from a broader standpoint, as well as a great
number of whistling related superstitions that involve everything from you know,
ghosts and monsters to more sort of societal pressures. Yeah,

(32:30):
this brings us to the topic of chin chow, which
I believe translates to something like lengthy always or forever whistling.
It's an ancient Daoist practice that involves the use of long, drowned,
drawn out whistling as a means of cultivating and balancing
one's vital force or chi And I think that just that,
that that one nugget of information there, Like, I feel

(32:52):
like that kind of balance as well with sort of
a broader experience with whistling. There is something about whistling
that certainly takes you out of um, out of your thoughts,
and kind of puts you in the now, even if
you're just if you were to say, set there and
focus on whistling a single tone and sort of concentrate
on it without even bursting into song and so forth, yes,

(33:14):
I would agree with that. And I guess one of
the first things that comes to my mind is that
whistling seems very similar to breath. And of course many
sort of traditional meditation practices involved manipulation of breath in
one way or another. That seems to have some kind
of um power of focusing in the mind in a
certain way, or unfocusing the mind if you want that.

(33:37):
The control of breath is like that. And I guess
in a way, though um speech is also control of breath,
So I'm not sure why it's that different, but it
it seems a different kind of control of breath that's
more akin to the slow, steady breathing exercises that you
would be more likely to find in a meditative practice. Yeah.
Sometimes this whole sort of suite of ideas that sometimes

(33:58):
referred to as as like breath magic. Uh and and yeah,
I think you could you could throw whistling in there.
But also some of the various sounds that are made
in meditative breathing practices, such as home uh, such as
there are also various meditation practices where the exhale takes
on more of the form of a of a of
an animal noise like a roaring, etcetera. But but yeah,

(34:22):
in this case, yeah, we definitely are talking about some
form of of breath magic and that the chang shao.
It frequently pops up in Chinese literature, with one classic
example being Rhapsody on Whistling by Ching Gong Psi, who
lived to thirty one through two seventy three. It's too
long of a work to read here in full, but

(34:43):
but key passages about whistling as a practice of the
uh secluded gentleman are as follows. I'm going to skip
over many lines here, so this is not a full
experience of the translated text. Distancing himself from the exquisite
in the common, he abandons his personal concer earns. Then,
filled with noble emotion, he gives a long drawn whistle.

(35:05):
He sends forth marvelous tones from his red lips and
stimulates mournful sounds from his gleaming teeth. The sound rises
and falls, rolling in his throat. The breath rushes out
and is repressed, then flies up like sparks. The whistle
floats like a wandering cloud in the grand imperiod. H

(35:27):
And I'm told, okay, this is the transcendental void, and
gathers a great wind for a myriad miles. When the
song is finished and the echoes die out, it leaves
behind a pleasure that lingers on in the mind. Indeed,
whistling is the most perfect natural music, which cannot be
imitated by strings or woodwinds. For every category, he has

(35:49):
a song to each thing he perceives. He tunes a melody.
Oh that's great. That that gives me chills, dude, Yeah, yeah,
So this this is the copy of the text I
was looking at is in the Colombia Anthology of Traditional
Chinese Literature, and sinologist Victor H. Mayor provides some additional

(36:12):
details on what is being described here. So he describes
the Chinese transcendental whistling as being quote, a kind of
nonverbal language with affinities to the spiritual aspect of meditation.
So it's a tool of the individual for self cultivation
in search of enlightenment, and is mentioned in appendices to

(36:33):
the Classic of Changes or the ea Ching. Okay, so
we actually, I think we did an episode on the
eaching a long time ago. We did like three or
four years ago, now maybe, so, yeah, I think it
was pretty pandemic. So the mind controls the breath, and
with his breath he whistles, and with his whistle, well,
here here's another quote from mayor quote from any given

(36:55):
point of view, each object or situation fits into a category.
For we, there is a corresponding hexagram. Each hexagram consists
of yin and yang lines, which may be interpreted as
patterns of sound. These are the songs. So whenever the
whistler perceives something, he immediately transposes it into a melody.

(37:17):
With his control of the vital breath, he can manipulate
these sounds and thereby control any phenomena. So I'm trying
to remember the the eaching, of course contains the hexagrams,
but I'm trying to remember the significance of the hexagrams
beyond the divination purpose of the eaching. Um do do
you recall more than I do? Here? Well? I think

(37:39):
the main thing to keep in mind is that these
different heck, these hexagrams come together and they mean things,
and then they mean things in particular sequences. And so
I think for our purposes here we might think of
these as being sort of un encoding of reality. And
then the whistle here, the the Chinese transcendental whistling, can

(38:00):
be used as a way first of sort of meeting
the coded reality, but then also controlling the encoded reality.
And it is said that the whistle alone can can
quote turn the pure Yang hexagram inside out to form
the pure Yen hexagram. So we're getting into like the
vital energies of the universe here. And the idea here

(38:23):
is that if if someone is is an expert in this,
if they know what they're doing, then not only are
they sort of confronting reality with the whistle, but then
they are they're able to change things and flip things,
alter the universal energy involved in a given situation. Okay,
I see. So it's a kind of a meaning magic
in the same way that language itself sometimes is used to,

(38:45):
you know, the traditions that ascribe sort of magical power
to certain words or um or or symbols signifying words.
But it's just not the same as the language. It's
like an alternate version of meaning magic. Yeah. And and
I and I have to to stress you idea this
is we're talking about those kind of lofty dallast practice here.

(39:07):
So um, you know, we're we're only sort of loosely
describing it. But but I believe this is the gist
of it. Uh. And this is the way of looking
at it that is useful to move forward, and again
we'll come back to perhaps in the next episode, we'll
get back into some other uh traditional Chinese ideas concerning
whistling in general, and some of these ideas will sort

(39:28):
of flow back into this topic of transcendental whistling. Now.
One of the things that I found really interesting about this,
this idea of using sound, using the whistle and then
sort of changing something about reality, is that uh. And
ultimately the idea of breath, the breath becoming sound, and
sound not only describing but transforming something. Um, I this

(39:50):
stirred something in my memory. So and uh and I
think another part was the eaching connection because I was
reminded of something that Terence McKenna discussed in his of
True Hallucinations, a concept that his brother Dennis I think
largely contemplated called the psycho audible warp phenomenon. And this
is gonna also get you know, we're going from from

(40:13):
from from Dallas to uh uh transcendental practices here into
the work of Terence McKenna and his brother Dennis. So um,
you know this is another sort of lofty idea, but
it has to do as I've read. It has to
do with the trip tomine metabolism and the electro spin
resonance of the psilocybin molecule. And I don't pretend to

(40:36):
understand it entirely, but it does seem to boil down
to a sort of voice sound based manipulation of reality
while one is within an altered state of mind. Okay,
So I, when you're talking about mckennay, you never know
exactly It's it's hard to tell exactly how magical he's
claiming something. Are they talking about literally actually changing external

(41:00):
physical reality by the use of of UH sounds and
and and hallucinations in the mind. Um, it's it's hard
to say, right, I mean, it's when with a lot
of this kind of stuff one gets the idea of
it's like the chasing of some sort of of an
idea that it's all about, sort of, you know, the

(41:20):
ideas coming together things that they've read and and taking
on new forms within the psychedelic experience. So yeah, it's
it's it's hard to say, But I was curious on
reading somebody else's take on all this, so I found
a paper titled The Weird Naturalism of the Brothers McKenna
by Eric Davis for the International Journal for the Study

(41:43):
of New Religions, published in two thousand and sixteen. And
this is an expert This is one of the things
that Davis says here. Davis writes, quote, Dennis believed that
a psycho fluid could be generated through the vocal effect.
He had discovered a psycho audible warp phenomenon that generated
a specific kind of energy field that can rupture three

(42:03):
dimensional space. Of course, had this wild theory. The buzz
that Dennis hurt in his head was caused by the
electron spin resonance or es R of the metabolizing psilocybin
alkaloids inserting themselves into the base pairs of his neuronal DNA.
This sound was picked up and amplified through the antenna

(42:25):
created through this Similarly, resonating harmine alkaloids let loose from
the ayahuasca vine that they nippled. By imitating this sound
with his voice, it's harmonic frequencies would be canceled out,
calling the harmine psilocybine DNA complex to drop into a stable,
superconducting hyperdimensional state with apocalyptic results. Okay, okay, I don't

(42:50):
want to be unkind, but this reads to me as
another one of these cases of somebody who's kind of
a psychonaut having a a profound, very person only meaningful,
ineffable experience on a psychedelic and then trying desperately to
sort of literally externalize that experience and say, no, it
has some kind of literal, causative physical reality to it. Yeah,

(43:15):
and they're there. I think that's that's fair. And then
they're also of course again, you go into a psychedelic
experience bringing all of these other pre existing ideas and
certainly they seem to be tapping into some alchemical concepts
as well. Davis says that it's difficult to really figure
out what Dennis is getting at here, but there are
a lot of comparisons to the alchemical concept of the

(43:36):
Philosopher's Stone and the creation of this belief that the
quote from Dennis's quote, the ultimate technological artifact that would
hold a great deal of power over reality. That's getting
into the apocalyptic results. Uh so, uh so, yeah, yeah,
there's there's there's more than a little alchemy tied up
into this concept. Now, the idea of the psychedelic ex

(44:00):
arians and all of this is interesting and and elsewhere
mckinna does connect all of this to whistling in a
more well, I guess, grounded manner. So this is a
quote I believe this is from one of mckinna's many talks.
He says, quote, Ayahuasca is different by sound, by song,
by whistling, and its ability to transform sound, including vocal sound,

(44:21):
into the visual spectrum indicates that some kind of information
processing membrane or boundary is being overcome by the pharmacology
of this stuff and things normally experienced as acoustically experienced
become visibly beheld, and it's quite spectacular unquote. And this
would definitely be I think an example of tarrance of
Terence speaking about something uh with a little more of

(44:44):
the science hat on as opposed to the psychonod hat right.
I mean, I think there he's describing the phenomenology of
drug induced synesthesia, the idea that when under the influence
of some psychedelics, you can the perception of one normal
uh piece of sense information can can bleed over into another. So,

(45:05):
for example, people on certain psychedelics often report being able
to like hear colors or see sounds and so forth. Yeah,
now now getting into what Terrence is talking about here
concerning ayahuasca. Um Aahuasca, for anyone unfamiliar, is a psychoactive
brew used for ceremonial purposes among various indigenous peoples of
the Amazon Basin. Taking it can result in an altered

(45:28):
state of consciousness, complete with hallucinations. And for a little
more about whistling and all of this, I turned to
a paper. This is a paper by Fred Katz and
Maryline dobb Ken at De Rios published in the Journal
of American Folklore. Again, it's the ninety one and it's
titled Hallucinogenic Music, An Analysis of the role of Whistling

(45:49):
in Peruvian ayahuasca healing sessions and in at the author's
point out that drug induced states and music tend to
go hand in hand, and traditions around the world that
involves psychoactive substances. They're talking about religious traditions here, But
I think this this also carries on into modern psychedelic
culture as well. Only ancient societies they didn't have Steve

(46:11):
Roach albums to listen to. They couldn't just play something
on their iPhone. They had their traditional musical instruments, they
had their voices, they had their songs, and they had
their whistles. Yeah, I think it is totally not an
accident that psychedelic drugs are widely associated with music in
the twentieth century. I don't think that's a coincidence because
I don't know, because The Grateful Dead was a band

(46:32):
instead of visual artists or filmmakers or something. I mean,
I think that there is sort of an inherent connection
between psychedelics and music, that the altered state of consciousness
for some reason is very well complimented by music. We
you know, I don't know. The patterns created by music
tend to be very pleasing to people in in altered

(46:54):
states of consciousness and uh, and it's sort of a
feedback loop to right that there's there's this idea that
people on psychedelics often enjoy listening to music but also
want to create music. Yeah, I mean, the psychedelic experience
can change the way the music is heard, the way
it's interpreted, and so forth. And they get into this
a little bit in the paper. They describe the use

(47:14):
of whistling incantations with these ayahuasca ceremonies, which are thought
to allow one to evoke the spirit of the vine
for healing purposes. And they point out that on one hand,
the uses of sacred music and a sit in these
sorts of situations, this is not all that different from
the use of say Gregorian chant and med evil Christianity.

(47:34):
You know, we we also do we can't we can't
go into a scenario like this and forget that music
on its own is already this powerful thing that that
alters thought, um, you know, and can can make minds
work in unison with each other. But we do have
the added psychedelic factor here to take into account, um
and uh and and this is where where it gets

(47:57):
perhaps a little more interesting with the ayahuasca scenario. They
write quote such phenomena as the slowing down or changing
of time. Perception must be related to how music is
perceived by the individual under the effects of powerful alkaloids
harmone and harmline present in the ayahuasca potion. The number

(48:17):
of metronomic markings listed earlier the paper includes some sheet
music notations of the whistling may not indeed be perceived
as they would in an ordinary state. So that's worth
thinking about the idea of of music that is is
not only not not only is it interesting when it
is heard during this particular altered state of consciousness, but

(48:39):
it is created to be heard in this altered state
of consciousness. Yeah, well, I would say that that there
are other parallels to modern popular music there. Um, what
would you say about genres of music that are most
often associated with the psychedelic experiences. I would say they
tend to be more sort of meandering and repetitive. And

(49:00):
I think that's because you know, like jam bands and
stuff for or stoner metal or any of those things,
that they tend to create these um patterns that repeat
a lot and are are less tight and focused than
say a normal two and a half minute pop song. Uh,
and that has that clearly has something to do again
with the phenomenology of the psychedelic experience, that there's something

(49:23):
about like sort of getting into a state of mind
and lingering there and maybe changes in the perception of
time and patterns and stuff. Yeah, that's a that's a
good point about the repetition because you think you can
think of various, right or different genres of popular music
today that have strong connections to like psychedelic drug culture things.
Is different to say citrants and say doom metal. You know,

(49:47):
you wouldn't mistake one for the other. But when you
get into like long h uses of repetition, there are
similarities there. But so, okay, that's music specifically and why
certain kinds of music might traditionally be a so seated
with these ceremonies that involves psychedelics. But like, what what
about the specific characteristics of whistling would come in right,

(50:08):
So to bring us back to this ayahuasca scenario, you
have someone taking the ayahuasca beginning to have this experience
and they're being guided by a shaman the shaman is
using whistling as part of their guidance. So the authors
point out in the seventy one paper, the music seems
to have an effect on the visuals that the individual
under the influence of ayahuasca reports, and that the shaman

(50:31):
leading the ceremony and guiding the individual through the experience
will alter their use of melodies as needed, such as
one example being in response to the patient UH, the
individual taking that has taken the drug, experiencing nausea or
or vomiting. Different melodies are said to evoke different sorts
of visions, and the music the whistling is said to

(50:54):
help push the individual past the naza nasea, past the vomiting,
past and initial anxiety that is a part of the UH,
the the experience, and into the desired alternate state that
is often said to sort of exist beyond the nausea,
beyond the vomiting, beyond the initial like physical reaction to
the substances. I wonder if the specific potency of whistling

(51:20):
there and not just any type of singing or drumming
or anything like that. UH. It might have something to
do with the specific bioacoustic properties of whistling that we
talked about earlier, like the ability of whistling to cut
through other ambient sounds and to use a music engineer's term,
to cut through the mix uh in a way that

(51:41):
many other types of of naturally produced music wouldn't, say,
you know, singing or drumming or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, because
you can imagine this scenario where the shaman is is
having to cut through probably quite a bit. I mean,
obviously this is not something that this experience is likely
not taking place in an urban environment. But there there
may be the sound sounds of of nature outside of

(52:02):
the enclosure that one is having this experience in. There
may be other you know, sounds within the uh, the enclosure,
and of course there is the physical experience that's going
on that coul that would be quite distracting. And here
is the shaman with this whistle, this music that is
cutting through all that, or to cut through hallucinated sounds.

(52:23):
That's true. Yeah, I thought there's one more quote from
the paper here I thought was key quote. It is
possible that the patients augmented suggestibility encounters in the presence
of the healer a creative source and origin of music
which alleviates anxiety, tranquilizes and causes a turning inward by
the musical evocation of particular visions. And so that turning

(52:48):
inward reminds me once more of those descriptions of Chinese
transcendental whistling and the inward journey there so, and in
a way, I kind of feel like it comes comes
full circle there um. So you know. So, so this
is all I think it accounts for a handful of
of probably um extreme examples of whistling that is not

(53:11):
mundane whistling that takes on this heightened meaning. Be be
that heightened meaning reliant upon some sort of uh, psychoactive property,
or merely just some sort of an intense thought process
and meditation ritual. Yeah. So I was just looking back
at those lines you quoted from the Rhapsody on whistling,
the translation of it um, and so I'm thinking about

(53:34):
that with reference to the psychedelic experience, which you know,
in many cases, I think it is thought to be
largely associative. That a big characteristic of the religious psychedelic experiences,
maybe um, forming associations between things in the mind where
the cause of that association is not obvious or is
not literal. And to that point, I think of the

(53:56):
line in the Rhapsody that says, for every category he
has a song to everything he perceives. He tunes a
melody the idea that there are certain whistles or or
or sequences of whistles, maybe like tunes connected to ideas,
even though there there's no way that that tune that
you just whistled actually means a leopard, or actually means

(54:19):
a house, or means a tree, But for some reason
in your mind, suddenly it does. And in fact, the
same thing is true of language. That's you know, one
of the weird fundamental features of language, when you stop
to think about it, is that the word tree has
nothing to do with the tree, that the association that
you make between them is is purely a learned association.

(54:39):
That it's not to be found anywhere in nature. The
same would be true of the melody. Yet for some
reason in your mind you kind of create a language
that suddenly that melody means the concept. Yeah. So I
think on one hand these examples are are the extreme,
but they also do get to some of the core
realities of whistling that we've been discussing all along. Uh so, so, yeah,

(55:02):
this is this has been a fascinating journey thus far,
and we're not done yet. We have so much more
to discuss. In the next episode, we're going to get
into whistling and antiquity, uh basic questions like did the
ancient Romans whistle? Well, it's it's a more complicated question
than you might think, as well as what happens when
God whistle? Oh God, the whistling, the whistling and the

(55:23):
divine Yes, that's that also, that was the whole question
that took me off guard. But that'll be fun to
discuss as well. Also, I think we want to talk
something about the psychology of whistling that might further inform
some of the discussions we've had today. Yeah, all right,
well we were We hope that you're enjoying this, uh,
this journey as much as we are. And of course
we'd love to hear from everybody, because whistling is something

(55:44):
that that all or or most of you are are
somewhat familiar with, or you're gonna have particular connections to
it in general or specific connections even to some of
the traditions that we've discussed here. We'd love to hear
from you, so definitely right in about your whistle and
the whistling of others. In the meantime, new episodes of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the core episodes published on

(56:06):
Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesday's we do a short form
artifact or monster fact. On Monday's we do listener mail.
On Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns and just
talk about a strange film. 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 topic for the future,
or just to say hello, you can email us at

(56:27):
contact at stuff to blow your Mind dot com. Stuff
to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart
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(57:03):
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