In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the nature and history of human whistling – including the subject of whistled languages. (originally published 08/04/2022)
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. Time to go into the vault for an older episode of the show. This one originally aired August fourth, twenty twenty two, and it is part two of our series on whistling.
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
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. 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 Mastaco languages and in Mexico, and I wanted to start off today's episode by talking about some other examples of whistled languages and some of the common characteristics between them, because, of course, the Mezteko 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 twenty twenty one. So it's a very recent paper. 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 so I think it's worth mentioning a few more examples of these in describing how they work and seeing what we can compare in contrast with them. So one example I was reading about was in a really interesting twenty seventeen article in BBC Travel by Elliott Stein, and the story here goes like this. In Greece, there is a remote mountain village called Antia, which is found on the southern eastern coast of the Greek island of Evia in the Aegean Sea. And within this village there has long been a whistle based language called Spheria, which allows speakers to communicate across great distances, and it seems to have been 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, Antia's population has dwindled from two hundred and fifty to thirty seven, and as older whistlers lose their teeth, many can no longer sound Spheria's 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 are descriptions of some efforts to try to teach it to more people, but of course, whenever you're talking about a language with that few speakers, 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 Spheria here was not documented anywhere in the outside world until the year 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 two academics. So a big question here is 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, and apparently local legends abound. So one story I came across this was described in some detail in a documentary piece on PBS News Hour that was about Spherea, and it claimed that the language was invented about two five hundred years ago, not by Greeks, but by Persians after they were defeated at the Battle of Salamis. So Salamis was a battle in four ADBCE during the Persian invasion of Greece under zerk Sees the Great, and so Salamis was 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, the legend about the whistle speech goes that the Persian survivors of the battle I guess they were, you know, 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 avoided detection was by coming up with a way of speaking in whistles that would sound just like the birds, so they could communicate with each other, but their speech would not be intelligible and in many ways would probably not even be detected. Oh wow, but that story has a kind of legendary quality. I'm not sure how much there is behind that, but it's a great story nonetheless, and steinsit some other local legends as well. Some residents believe it was invented during the Busante 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 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 the handful of people there who still use the whistle language, and they apparently use it in many of the same scenarios described in that paper on the Mastako whistle speech that I've talked about in the last episode. A big scenario of use 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 Dimitra Hengen who studies Sphere and she says that Spheria 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 Mezateeko example, because in both cases the whistled language is not like an totally independent, unique language. Instead, it is in some way adapting and existing spoken language to 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 actually informs that one way or another, But yeah, I had the same intuition at least. So one of the most remarkable things about Spheria, again similar to the Mezteko whistle speech example, is that it is intelligible at a great distance. You can understand messages in Spheria update to about four kilometers away on this mountainous terrain, which Hingen 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 Cathalis who tells a story about some of 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 to come keep warm. She did, and that's how my parents fell in love.
Well, that is a better ending than something like this. And the descendants 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 tell a lot of questions about the Persian origin theory. It just seems like it seems I could be missing something major here, but it seems like it begs more questions than it answers.
Well. Yeah, as I said, it sounds more like legend to me than like an strongly evidence based explanation.
Yeah, when I agree, away from being a full blown ghost story.
But so I've described two 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 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 an article in Smithsonian Magazine from twenty twenty 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 is used in the Canary Islands, on the mountainous islands of Lagomera and eliero In that are 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 topographical or sort of geographical features 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 or rugged mountains, or in dense vegetation like dense forest or dense savannah. So why would it be those two places mountains or in dense vegetation. Well, to focus on mountains first, Maya 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 traverse quickly than people in other types of topographical settings. So Maya writes quote in Eliero and Lakomera in the Canary Islands, in the region around Kushkoi in Turkey, in the High Altus, or in the Pyrenees near the village of Os two points, only five hundred meters apart can easily represent an hour in walking time. Thus, whistled forms of languages serve as soon as the spoken forms become ineffective. Between forty and one hundred meters. Depending on terrain, whistles can be heard up to seven kilometers away in some vas okay. So the idea here is that in mountainous terrain you have 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, that's a long that's a big time investment. So it's actually worth your time 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, Meyer writes quote the vegetation in dense tropical forests and savannahs restricts visual contact and limits the propagation of sound. 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 killihertz, within which reverberation in forests varies less with distance. In dense vegetation, whistled language facilitates the coordination of individuals during group movements, especially during hunting and fishing. Whistling also 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 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 meters up to five hundred meters, depending on the density of vegetation. Okay, so there are a lot of advantages in the forest or thick savanna. So the idea is that, of course whistling speech allows you to communicate kate without being able to see each other. Sitelines are limited by the vegetation itself, but also whistling just carries better in the forest. It propagates better through the forest without being drowned out by the sort of the reverberation effects of having all that foliage there. And it also seems to pierce through ambient sound much better. And Holmes also summarizes some of these advantages of whistling 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 one hundred and twenty decibels with a whistle, which is loud. That's like he compares it to a car horn. It says it's actually louder than a car horn, 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 hertz. Meyer said between one to three killer hertz, roughly the same space which Holmes says is above the pitch of most ambient noise. And this is interesting because I was thinking about, why do we keep noticing that whistling sounds, the ones made by humans are similar to bird song. Well, one thing that occurs to me here is that bird song is probably shaped by natural selection to propagate through vegetation and to cut through ambient noise from the environment 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 bird song, having similar frequency ranges because similar forces are shaping them. In the 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 losing the least energy to reverberation in the forest. And that just happens to be the whistle that sounds like a bird.
Yeah, yeah, this is interesting to think think about on one hand, I'm a quiet whistler. My whistler, my whistle is not very loud, and therefore it can be a little surprising when I encounter someone who has a very loud whistle, and you're reminded just how loud a whistle can be. So that's important to factor into all of this. And another connection that came up in some of the research I was doing was that 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 gain attention, et cetera. And you also see things like yodling thrown in there. Yodling also an art form, if you will, or a performance or to a sound that developed that also had to do with communicating or calling animals, 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 at a distance, Like you might be able to hear that somebody is shouting, but you can't hear the difference between consonants or they making a T sound or a K sound like I don't know. At a distance, that kind of all disappears. But if you're judging more on sequences of pitches, yeah, then suddenly the confusion created by distance is reduced.
Yeah. Yeah, just just yelling doesn't necessarily cut it, right, because if you can't, if your 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, get to somewhere where it is yodling, or you shift over into a whistling, and that develops into some sort of a whistling language. So yeah, it's just the more you look at it, the more sense it makes for this kind of purpose.
Now, another thing going on with whistled languages is that most of them, perhaps all of them, 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 Mazteko whistle speech was a whistled variant of the tonal Mesteko language. Spherea appears to be a whistled system for encoding spoken Greek. The whistle speech system of the Canary Islands, called Silbo, 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 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, So say, like a high pitched version of the syllable ma means something different than a lower pitched version of the syllable MA, or an upgliding tone on that syllable, and so forth, like the tone of the syllable actually makes a difference. Non tonal languages are not like so in English, we don't encode much information into the tones of syllables. It's just like, what are the vowels and consonants.
Yeah, the tone can contain some information, but not nearly to the extent that you find in true tonal languages. Right.
No, it's not lexical information, more like maybe sort of contextual mood information or inflection.
Right, Like the difference between 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 it was or maybe you ran the dog, you know, like that sort of thing. But it doesn't change the actual yeah information contained in the word no.
It's more like about the implied information about the attitude of the speaker or.
Something, yeah, or I need you to walk the dog. It applies 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 got a tonal language and you want to make a whistled version of that. In most cases, it seems like you preserve 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 Holmes article I mentioned quotes this scholar, Julian Meyer, explaining that we already use subtle differences in frequencies to distinguish between spoken phonemes, like the differences between certain vowels and consonants. So think about the vowels E and O. A long E vowel sound has a higher pitch than a long oh vowel sound, and if you say them back to back, you can listen to the descending melody of those vowel sounds EO, EO, And in fact, though it's harder to hear it 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 so the discussion of this in the article got me thinking about, even without having 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. This was a kind of weird exercise, but I was like, hey, can you tell what I'm saying here? And so I tried things like which she took a minute on but decided I was saying hello, nice to meet you, which is what I was trying to say, 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 she had heard me say before, especially when I tried to whistle, common phrases that we use with our dog, so immediately she heard as all buddy. And I think this ties into something we've talked about on the show before, the exactg CD musicality that humans tend to use when speaking to babies and pets. For some reason, there may be evolutionary reasons for this, that when we speak to cute things that need our care and attention, you know, babies or pets, says kind of it might be creepy to think about them this way, but to some extent, kind of psychologically surrogate babies that 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 going to keep whistling? Was it a big enough success?
Oh? No, I think that would be a horrible idea. Also, strangely, the dog did not seem to get it. So when I whistled all buddy Rachel could tell what I was saying, but Charlie did not seem affected.
I tried whistling to my cat whilst researching information for these episodes, and yes, you didn't care. And my wife was like, like, you can't speak to a cat in whistles. You have to use the kissie sound. That's what they understand. That's what that's the language they speak.
It is known.
But the kissie sound clicks, I mean, these are all these are not too far removed from whistling. Some of these type of sounds will come up again later on.
Indeed. Now, one 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 emerged in human evolution. Now why on earth would that be? Well, a couple of thoughts here. One, I just want to read a passage from the Holmes article in Smithsonian quote. One of the big challenges of language is the need to control the vocal cords to make the full range of speech sounds. None of our closest relatives, the great apes, have developed such control, but whistling maybe an easier first step. Indeed, a few orangutans in zoos have been observed to imitate zoo employees whistling as they work. When scientists tested one ape under controlled conditions, the animal was indeed able to mimic sequences of several whistles. Okay, 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, 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 whistle languages tend to rely more on kind of formulaic sentences like you know, go that way, go toward it, et cetera, than on 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 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, they long go turned into speech and then you know, many thousands of years past, and then that speech in some cases transformed back into a whistled very end.
Yeah, 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 those sounds, if not all, those sounds, then evolve into more complicated forms. But then we never completely forget, we never completely abandon these other modes of auditory communication. 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, with maybe a couple of exceptions, their use is declining. Most of them are disappearing, and so we might wonder why. Well, several causes are cited in the Holmes article. One is strangely roads. You tend to find whistle speech only in places that are very remote, and that apparently the presence of well paved roads tends to cause whistle 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 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 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 of time, there's probably just less incentive to whistle across great distances.
Yeah. Yeah, I also imagine that it's quite useful in communicating with the not yet seen. So 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 see them yet, and it might be nice to just sort of check in with them to like, and the mere fact that they can speak the whistle language gives you a certain amount of information on top of anything they provide then via the whistling.
Yeah. Another hypothesized explanation for the decline of whistle speech, especially 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 hunting and other survival subsistence activities within thick forest. Remember the motivations, the sort of iioacoustic 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 to like set aside special attention and care to preserve them. I believe in the Canary Islands the whistle speech is like is to some extent being taught in schools to help preserve it. And obviously that could be 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. Not to say that it can't be, but you know, but clearly, like holding on to languages. Keeping them alive are important even and even when they are not, you know, the traditional spoken languages, but they are these whistling tongues.
However, despite all this talk we've been 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 has been around since ancient times, that whistling is also it has a 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 in 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. We never have any additional values added to it. It's never infernal or celestial, it's never vulgar or anything of that nature. But of course this is this is far from from the truth. There's this deep well across pretty much every culture here we can look to where whistling has some sort of added meaning. It takes on various supernatural tones, and some of these will we'll 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 whiz whistling. But this is a topic that also has connections to some other areas, So this should this should be a fun journey we'll take and then again come back in later and discuss some more examples of whistling and Chinese culture 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.
Take me there.
Yeah, this markes us to the topic of cheng shao, which I believe translates to something like lengthy always or forever whistling. It's an ancient Dallas practice that involves the use of long, drown drawn out whistling as a means of cultivating and balancing one's vital force or chi. And I think that just that that one nugget of information there, like I feel like that kind of balance as well with sort of a broader experience of whistling. There is something about whistling that certainly takes you out of out of your thoughts and kind of puts you in the now, even if you're just if you were to say, sit there and focus on whistling a single tone and sort of concentrate on it without even you know, bursting into song and so.
Forth, yes, 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 involve manipulation of breath in one way or another that seems to have some kind of power of focusing in the mind in a certain way or unfocusing the mind if you want that that can. Control of breath is like that, And I guess in a way though, speech is also control of breath. So I'm not sure why it's that different, but 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 is sometimes referred to as like breath magic, 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 ohm, such as there are also various meditation practices where the exhale takes on more of the form of an animal noise like a roaring, etc. But yeah, in this case, yeah, we definitely are talking about some form of breath magic and the chang shao. It frequently pops up in Chinese literature, with one classic example being Rhapsody on Whistling by Ching goong Si, who lived two thirty one through two seventy three. It's too long of a work to read here in full, but key passages about whistling as a practice of the 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 concerns. Then, filled with noble emotion, he gives a long drawn whistle. 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 Empyrean, And I'm told, hey, 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'll 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 a song to each thing he perceives, He tunes a melody.
Oh that's great. That gives me chills, dude.
Yeah, yeah. So this is the copy of the text I was looking at is in nineteen ninety four's The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature, and snologist Victor H. Meyer provides some additional 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 the Classic of Changes or the e Ching.
Okay, so we actually, I think we did an episode on the eaching a long time ago. We did, Yeah, it was like three or four years ago. Now maybe I think it was pre pandemic. So the mind controls the breath, and with his breath he whistles. And with his whistle, well, here's another quote from there. Quote from any given point of view, each object or situation fits into a category for which 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. With his control of the vital breath, he can manipulate these sounds and thereby control any phenomena. So I'm trying to remember 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. Do you recall more than I do?
Well? I think the main thing to keep in mind is that these different 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 an encoding of reality. And then the whistle here, the Chinese transcendental whistling, can 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 quote turn the pure yang hexagram inside out to form the pure yin hexagram. So we're getting into the vital energies of the universe here. And the idea here is that if someone 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'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, you know, the traditions that ascribe sort of magical power to certain words 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 I have to to stress you idea this is we're talking about those kind of lofty dallist practice here, so you know, we're only sort of loosely describing it. But I believe this is the gist of it, 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 traditional Chinese ideas concerning whistling in general, and some of these ideas will sort of flow back into this topic of transcendental whistling. Now. One of the things that I've found really interesting about this, this idea of using sound, using the whistle, and then sort of changing something about reality, is that and ultimately the idea of breath, the breath becoming sound, and sound not only describing but transforming something. I this stirred something in my memory. So and I think another part was the e ching connection, because I was reminded of something that Terence McKenna discussed in his book True Hallucinations, a concept that his brother Dennis I think largely contemplated called the psycho audible warp phenomenon. And this is going to also get you know, we're going from from from from Dallas transcendental practices here into the work of Terrence McKenna and his brother Dennis. So you know, this is another sort of lofty idea, but it has to do as I've read. It has to do with the triptamine metabolism and the electro spin resonance of the psilocybin molecule. And I don't pretend to 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.
Uh okay, So I when you're talking about McKenna, 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 physical reality by the use of sounds and hallucinations in the mind.
That'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 a of an idea that it's all about sort of you know, the ideas coming together things that they've read and taking on new forms within the psychedelic experience. So Yeah, 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 Nowaturalism of the Brothers McKenna by Eric Davis for the International Journal for the Study of New Religions, published in twenty sixteen, and this is an excerpt. 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 psychoaudible warp phenomenon that generated quote, a specific kind of energy field that can rupture three dimensional space. According to this wild theory, the buzz that Dennis heard in his head was caused by the electron spin resonance or ESR 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 created through the similarly resonating harmine alkaloids let loose from the ayahuasca vine that they nibbled. By imitating this sound with his voice, its harmonic frequencies would be canceled out calling the harmine silicybine DNA complex to drop into a stable, super conducting hyperdimensional state with apocalyptic results.
Okay, okay, I don't 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 profound, very personally 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, and they're they're 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 Philosopher's Stone and the creation of this. I believe that the quote from Dennis's quote, the ultimate technological artifact that would hold a great deal of power over reality, this getting into the apocalyptic results. So so yeah, there's more than a little alchemy tied up into this concept. Now, the idea of the psychedelic experience and all of this is interesting, 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, 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. This would definitely be I think an example of Terrence speaking about something with a little more of the science hat on as opposed to the psychonat hat right.
I mean, I think there he's describing the phenomenology of a drug induced synesthesia, the idea that when under the influence of some psychedelics, you can the perception of one normal piece of sense information can bleed over into another. So, for example, people on certain psychedelics often report being able to hear colors or see sounds and so forth.
Yeah, now now getting into what Terrence is talking about here concerning ayahuasca. Ayahuasca, 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 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 nineteen seventy one paper by Fred Katz and Mariline Dobken de Rios published in the Journal of American Folklore. Again, this is in nineteen seventy one, and it's titled Hallucinogenic Music, An Analysis of the Role of Whistling in Peruvian Ayahuasca healing sessions, and in it the author's point out that drug induced states and music tend to go hand in hand in traditions around the world that involves psychoactive substances. They're talking about religious traditions here, but I think this also carries on into modern psychedelic culture as well. Only ancient societies they didn't have Steve 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 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 complemented by music. I don't know. The patterns created by music tend to be very pleasing to people in altered states of consciousness. And it's sort of a feedback loop too, right, that 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 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 sa Gregorian chant in medieval Christianity. You know, 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 alters thought, you know, and can make minds work in unison with each other. But we do have the added psychedelic factor here to take into account. And this is where it gets 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 harmine and harmaline present in the ayahuasca potion. The number 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 we're thinking about the idea of music that is not only not only is it interesting when it is heard during this particular altered state of consciousness, but 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. What would you say about genres of music that are most often associated with psychedelic experiences. I would say they tend to be more sort of meandering and repetitive. And I think that's because you know, like jam bands and stuff, or or stone or metal or any of those things, that they tend to create these patterns that repeat a lot and are are less tight and focus than say a normal two and a half minute pop song, And that clearly has something to do again with the phenomenology of the psychedelic experience, that there's something 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 good point about the repetition, because you think you can think of various rather different genres of popular music today that have strong connections to psychedelic drug culture things. Is different to say cy trance and say doom metal. You know, you wouldn't mistake one for the other. But when you get into like long uses of repetition, there are similarities there.
But so okay, that's music specifically and why certain kinds of music might traditionally be associated with these ceremonies that involve psychedelics. But like, what about the specific characteristics of whistling would come in.
Right, 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 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 the individual taking that has taken the drug experiencing nausea or vomiting. Different melodies are said to evoke different sorts of visions, and the music, the whistling is said to help push the individual past the nausea, past the vomiting, past initial anxiety that is a part of 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 there and not just any type of singing or drumming or anything like that. 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 term, to cut through the mix in a way that many other types 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 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 may be the sounds of nature outside of the enclosure that one is having this experience in. There may be other sounds within the enclosure, and of course there is the physical experience that's going on 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.
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 patient's augmented suggestibility encounters in the presence of the healer a creative source and origin of music which deviates anxiety, tranquilizes, and causes a turning inward by the musical evocation of particular visions. And so that turning inward reminds me once more of those descriptions of Chinese transcendental whistling and the inward journey there, So in a way, I kind of feel like it comes full circle there. So this is all I think. It accounts for a handful of probably extreme examples of whistling that is not mundane whistling that takes on this heightened meaning. Be that heightened meaning reliant upon some sort of 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. And so I'm thinking about that with reference to the psychedelic experience, which you know, in many cases I think is thought to be largely associative. That a big characteristic of the religious psychedelic experience is maybe 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 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 sequences of whistles, maybe like tunes connected to ideas, even though there's no way that that tune that you just whistled actually means a leopard, or actually means 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 purely a learn association, 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. So yeah, 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. Basic questions like did the ancient Romans whistle? Well, it's a more complicated question than you might think, as well as.
What happens when God whistled?
Oh God, the whistling, the whistling and the divine Yes that 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 some about the psychology of whistling. They might further inform some of the discussions we've had today.
Yeah, all right, well, we were We hope that you're enjoying this journey as much as we are, and of course we'd love to hear from everybody because whistling is something that all or most of you are somewhat familiar with it, You're can 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 write 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 Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster fact. On Mondays 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 contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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