It’s the instrument that we all carry around with us throughout our lives. It’s more reliable and constant than our changing voices, a sound we can make as efficiently as children as we can when we’re nonagenarians, and it used to be a ubiquitous accompaniment to our routines, a cheery self-made soundtrack while we worked and when we played: the joyful sound of whistling.
And yet whistling is now endangered – and not only because in our private worlds of personal audio, on phones and laptops, we have access to the music of our entire species at the click of a button, so we don’t need to purse our lips to make any tune we might want to hear.
‘Whistling as a linguistic phenomenon is under threat’
It’s also because whistling as a linguistic phenomenon is under threat. The whistling languages of communities from Papua New Guinea to the Amazon, from the Canary Islands to France and Morocco, are under threat, thanks to a predictable combination of urbanisation and a loss of cultural memory. These astounding languages – fully semantic, but made of seemingly musical, non-verbal sound – use the acoustic power of whistling to travel distances that speech can’t, allowing communication across valleys and mountaintops: there’s no need to walk over to the next village if you can whistle them instead.
They are also a treasure trove for linguists and neuroscientists, because whistling makes language systems that light up parts of the brain that our speech on its own doesn’t. There are records of them going back to Ancient Greece and China, and the preservation of these whistling languages is a now matter of some urgency, because they are a unique part of the history and richness of how we communicate through sound as a species.
‘An expressive world that only whistling can conjure’
Someone who is bringing back whistling to culture is the professional whistler Molly Lewis, who was inspired to take up her career when she watched a documentary – called Pucker Up – on the Louisburg International Whistlers Convention which, sadly, had its last edition in 2013. Molly is now a whistler who uses her gifts to find an expressive world that only whistling can conjure on her albums and in her performances.
Her music is an ethereal throwback to a world of loungey, laid-back melancholy. The reverberating halo of her whistling is the sound of a new-minted nostalgia, with resonances of the era of the most famous recorded whistles of all, when Alessandro Alessandroni gave Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly its signature sound of disturbing wistfulness, captured in his unforgettable whistle across the desert.
Today, Molly Lewis’s albums sound out a musical place where you just want to join her; and return to the world in which we make our own soundtracks to our lives, thanks to the certainty that anyone can whistle – and we should!