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It\u2019s the instrument that we all carry around with us throughout our lives. It\u2019s more reliable and constant than our changing voices, a sound we can make as efficiently as children as we can when we\u2019re 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.<\/p>
And yet whistling is now endangered \u2013 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\u2019t need to purse our lips to make any tune we might\u00a0want\u00a0to\u00a0hear.<\/p>
It\u2019s 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 \u2013 fully semantic, but made of seemingly musical, non-verbal sound \u2013 use the acoustic power of whistling to travel distances that speech can\u2019t, allowing communication across valleys and mountaintops: there\u2019s no need to walk over to the next village if you\u00a0can\u00a0whistle them instead.<\/p> 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\u2019t. 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\u00a0a\u00a0species.<\/p> Someone who is bringing back whistling to culture is the professional whistler Molly Lewis<\/a><\/strong>, who was inspired to take up her career when she watched a documentary \u2013 called Pucker Up<\/em> \u2013 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. <\/p> 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<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s soundtrack for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly<\/em> its signature sound of disturbing wistfulness, captured in his unforgettable whistle across\u00a0the\u00a0desert.<\/p>‘An expressive world that only whistling can conjure’<\/h2>