Jane: This is But Why: a Podcast for Curious Kids? I'm Jane
Lindholm, hi, our theme music sounds a little different today,
doesn't it?
Our theme music sounds a little different today because you are
the ones whistling it. I'm so excited to hear all of your
wonderful whistles. We just heard Audrey, Aaron and Holden
from Burlington, Ontario, Burnsville, Minnesota and
Southern Ontario, Canada, respectively. Here are a few
more of you.
Ava: Hi, my name is Ava. I'm 13 years old, and I live in
Winnipeg, Manitoba. Hi, Bye, I love your show.
Jane: And here are twins, Madison and Kayla from
Lexington, Massachusetts.
Those were so great. And so many more of you sent us your own
versions of the But Why theme music and you whistling it? It
was so awesome to spend the last few days listening to all you
great whistlers. We've put together a chorus of all of the
whistling entries we got, and we're going to play that for you
later in the episode. But first, do you want to hear the guy who
actually whistled the theme song you know so well.
Luke: Hi. My name is Luke Reynolds. I'm a musician,
guitarist and a multi instrumentalist. That means I
play a lot of different instruments, and I was glad when
my friend Jane asked if I'd want to talk about whistling.
Jane: Luke performs in the band Guster, and he plays on a lot of
other musicians' records as well. He also makes really cool
music and albums of his own. Luke told me he actually
whistles a lot, not just in the finished versions of his songs,
but sometimes when he's trying to figure things out.
Luke: Whistling is easier for me than singing, because I have
more control over the subtleties and embellishments than I do
with my human voice. So I'll often use whistling as a way of
trying out different ideas for the guitar or the voice before I
actually play them.
Jane: One thing you may not know about our theme song is that it
actually comes from a song Luke wrote for one of his solo
albums, and it has words. The song is called, No Way to Know
What's Coming. The whistling part is right at the beginning,
just like you hear it in our show.
I asked Luke to tell us a little bit about why he decided to use
whistling in this song.
Luke: On the day we cut that song, we recorded it two or
three times, and I didn't practice it much at all before
we got started. I think at the last minute, I actually had the
idea to put the whistling in there so it's pretty off the
cuff. There's a lot of imperfections, and I decided to
leave them all in there because I thought it made it feel more
human.
No sunsets in the evening, and then one day, everything
happened. As times change, people change, feelings
change,but what becomes of us?
I was looking for an instrument to suggest at the lead melody
Jane: I'm so glad we finally got a chance to talk to Luke on this
that was out of the way of the acoustic in that it inhabited a
show, because his music is such a huge and recognizable part of
different frequency band. So the acoustic guitars were kind of in
the mid range. The whistling was way up top. Could have just as
But Why isn't it? So many of you or your adults tell us that you
easily use another instrument, like a violin or a shimmery
synthesizer way up high, but that day, there was something
that was pretty cool in the way that the voice and the right
walk around your home whistling or humming the theme music, and
hand of the guitar lock up together in a really cool and
human way.
so do we. But what if you don't know how to whistle? We're going
to spend some time practicing our whistling in this episode
and talking with people who know how to do it really well. Maybe
it'll help us learn how to do it or do it a little better. A few
years ago, I met a college student who was actually one of
the world champions of whistling. Did you know there
are whistling champions? He has some good tips on practicing how
Unknown: Hi, my name is Yuki Takeda. I am a whistler, a
to whistle.
musical whistler. I started whistling when I was 10 years
old, because all my friends could whistle, but I couldn't
whistle. If you have no idea how to whistle, this is the way to
do it. You say he and then you. And what you want to do is to
intensify the hiss noise that you get from the H.
By shaping your mouth correctly, you can amplify it so that it
would sound like a whistling. The most important thing is
where you put your tongue. The tip of your tongue must touch
your lower teeth, or your lower gum in the front. Both sides of
your tongue must be touching the upper back teeth. And then you
fold your tongue a little bit vertically so that it would make
a path of air in the middle. And then you want to whistle
downwards, not straight forward. That's the key. So if you've
been whistling and you've been hearing this wind noise, that's
almost whistling, but not there, if you whistle downwards, you'll
be able to get the note in five seconds.
Yuki: My one and only policy about whistling is that if I am
annoying someone, then I would not whistle. So I ask everyone
around me to tell me to stop whenever it's annoying, because
whistling should be a happy thing, not an annoying thing. So
these are different techniques that you can use for whistling,
glissando trills, inhaling and exhaling and double tones.
Unknown: And I've been trying to incorporate whistling into
beatboxing recently, it sounds like...
I am wanting to be the whistler who changes the image of
whistling. Whistling has been a performance or a show content,
but not really been perceived as a musical instrument. You cannot
not be happy when you're whistling, and if everyone's
whistling, the world should be more peaceful.
Jane: That was Yuki Takeda recorded a few years ago when he
was still a college student. Wasn't that whistling so
impressive? And I agree with Yuki, the world does seem like
it would be a more peaceful place if we just whistled more.
It's hard to feel sad or mad when you're whistling, isn't it?
That's something we discussed with our other guest for today's
episode. Check this out.
Ah, it's so beautiful.
Emily: Oh, thank you. Well, it's really fun to do. My name is
Emily Eagan. I am a musician of all kinds. I'm a singer. I am a
ukulele player, a pianist, a guitarist. I write songs, and
most of all, I whistle.
Jane: What does it mean? To be like a professional whistler, or
to say what you are as a job is a whistler? That's really cool.
Emily: That's a really good question, because it's something
that I've kind of had to find my own way with. I started out
singing, but every time I sang and there was a chance to do a
little bit of extra stuff, I would always throw in a little
whistling line, and people got really excited about it. And
then I started whistling for things like sports games, where
I would go and whistle the Star Spangled Banner, and I would
whistle just to make people laugh. And eventually I started
whistling. When I whistled in all my performances, I started
whistling for kids. I started whistling for grown ups. I even
started whistling like opera arias and things like that. So
basically, anything that you can sing or hum, you can whistle,
and that's what I've tried to do. Whistling used to be a
really fancy art form, and you could find people whistling
professionally all over the place. So one of the things that
I like to do is remind people that that could happen again. So
if I sing a bunch of songs, then instead of singing, I'll get up
there in a fancy dress, or get up there with my instrument, and
I'll just whistle instead. And I'll really try to remind people
that whistling can do all these amazing things that any
instrument or voice can do.
Jane: Can you give us an example?
Emily: What's really cool is when you can whistle something
really that goes really high and really low. So for example, I
have to lick my lips a little bit. You can whistle all kinds
of fancy stuff like that, like you probably know.
Jane: Oh, that was beautiful.
Emily: Thank you. So you can so it's really fun to show people
that you don't just have to whistle little tunes. You can
actually whistle big, fancy orchestral things.
Jane: Yeah, and can you whistle things like sounds that machines
make, or that birds make, and other things?
Unknown: I love making little bird sounds. If I hear a bird
outside, I try to whistle back to it. So if a bird goes, I
might go and see if I can have a little conversation with it, or
see if it can imitate me.
Jane: Okay, so I want to know how to do this, and I can
whistle a little bit, but not always. Sometimes I try to
whistle and it doesn't quite come out right. And I know that
for a lot of young people, especially, it takes a lot of
practice to whistle. So let's get into the actual physical art
and skill of whistling with some of the questions that we've
gotten.
Aurelia: I'm Aurelia. I live in New York. I'm six and three
quarters, and my question is, how do people whistle?
Alma: Hi, my name is Alma. I'm five years old. I live in
Oakland, California, and my question is, how we whistle, and
why is whistling so hard?
Jane: How do people whistle? And Ellie asks kind of a similar
question, so we can put them together.
Ellie: And I'm five years old, my question is, how does
whistling make a sound?
Adult: Where you from kiddo?
Ellie: I'm from Fort Drum, New York.
Jane: How does whistling make sound? So maybe we can talk
about the actual physical way we whistle with our throats.
Emily: Those are really, really good questions. Let's see. Well,
the thing that you whistle the most with, it looks like it's
your lips, and the style of whistling that I do is called
pucker whistling. But the thing you're really, really using is
your tongue.
Jane: I'm just gonna cut in here because we actually had a
question about tongues from Cecilia.
Cecilia: I am seven years old, and I am from Ames, Iowa. My
question is, why does your tongue depend on how high or low
your whistle is?
Em: So if you want to practice whistling, I would say the first
thing to do, you should lick your lips, because if your lips
are dry when the air passes, it doesn't feel very good. So you
should lick your lips or use some lip balm. I like to use
cherry lip balm, and then you stick your tongue touching your
bottom teeth, so your tongue touches your bottom teeth. And
what you're gonna do, you're kind of going to go like this,
but instead of saying those words, you're going to look for
a way to make it with a little stream of air. And you're trying
to figure out how to let air pass on the top of your tongue
and out your lips. You're making a little chamber. You're making
a tiny little instrument by curling your tongue. And the
thing that I like to think about is, you know, between your nose
and your lips, that's a little body part that not a lot of
people know the name of. It's called your philtrum. I like to
pretend that my whistle is coming out of that. That really
helps me make the sound have a little focal point, that little,
that little divot beneath your nose, is called your philtrum.
So if you want to practice whistling, just try making
little, tiny sounds. You can kind of pretend you're sipping
tea in a little, tiny space there. And just look for your
whistle. You don't want to put you don't want to push too much.
If you blow too much air, it won't work. You have to be
really, really gentle, and just look for that little spot where
you can find, you'll find your very first whistle that way. I
promise you. That sounds good.
Jane: Once you've done it for so many years, you forget what it
is that you're doing. You just do it naturally. So I'm trying
to picture it's true, where I'm putting my tongue, and how I'm
thinking about my lips. It's yeah, it's hard.
Emily: Well, and the next thing you can do is play with your
tongue, because that's what helps the notes go up and down.
So if you move your tongue forward, the notes go up. And if
you move it down, they go down. When you can make cartoon sounds
that way, you can sound like you're in an old fashioned
cartoon.
Jane: And so to Ellie's question about what's making that sound,
it's it's the breath passing through that small channel that
makes that sort of whistling noise.
Emily: Exactly. The breath is coming through and it's making
all of these overtones. Overtones are the reason that
you can hear a whistle really well is that it has all these
sparkly sounds in it. So whistling can be really loud and
clear and piercing, because you've got this really nice,
tight space. If you move your tongue up and down, you can get
a trill of vibrato, and that's really fun to try. You can. I'll
show you. I'll start straight, and then I'll make it wavy.
My tongue is going inside my mouth, so it's really fun to
play around with. You can spend hours sitting waiting for the
subway or bus just practicing your whistling.
Jane: Do you have advice, though, for people who can't
seem to make it work? Because I have to say, there is nothing
more frustrating than wanting to whistle and not being able to.
Unknown: I know that's so true, and people ask me that all the
time, I think the answer is just to try. And don't try too hard,
because if you really push and press, you won't get a good
whistle. But if you keep leaning into your lips and finding you
just want to find one special sweet spot, one special sound,
then I think that's the beginning of you whistling. And
I know people who it took them until they were 30 years old to
learn to whistle. So you're never too old to learn to
whistle.
Jane: So, you know, one of the other things that people want to
know is about, you know, not just how we whistle, But Why we
whistle. So why do you whistle? Why do you think humans make
this sound and enjoy it so much?
Emily: That's a really good question. And I have to say,
when I was a kid, I whistled for a bunch of different reasons,
but it was mostly to try to explore what I could do. I
almost when I was a kid, I think I was thinking, what, what does
this sound make? If I touch this part of my body, does it make a
sound? Pop, pop, pop. Or if I snap my fingers, it makes
sounds. And then eventually I found my way to whistling
because I think people are just curious what their bodies can
do. And whistling is one of those things in my family. My
sisters and I were always singing and always making making
noise. And so at some point someone would say, Please don't
sing. And so we would start humming. And then at some point
someone would say, please stop humming, and we would start
whistling. So I have to say as a kid, sometimes I whistled just
to be annoying, but it eventually turned into something
that I love to do, and I think humans whistle because it's fun.
I've noticed most of the time people whistle when they're
happy. You don't walk around whistling a sad song as much. I
think most of the time when people whistle, it's because
they feel really good and it feels really good to do it.
Jane: Or maybe when you are sad, if you start whistling, it'll
make you feel happier.
Emily: That's totally true. I think singing works that way
too. You can really dig into and just whistle all your blues
away. Whistling is also used as part of some languages. It's
part of silbo gomero, which is one of the languages in Spain's
Canary Islands. And there's actually a bunch of different
words that you can make using four vowels and five consonants
in that language, so you can communicate with it like a real
language. There's different sounds in the whistling.
Whistling is also used historically backstage, like in
theater and plays. Yeah, before people had electronic cues, they
would use a little bit of whistling to signal to someone
that they needed to bring down one of the big pieces of
scenery, for example, which is why it's considered bad luck to
whistle in the theater now, because of that history of the
possibility that if you whistled, something might fall
on your head.
Jane: Whistling has been used in other ways too, of course, to
communicate over far distances when you don't want to shout, or
when a place is really noisy, a whistle might be able to cut
through all the noise and get to the person you want to be able
to hear you. Or maybe you just use whistling to call your dog
when it runs away. When we come back, we'll whistle along to a
few more tunes and hear more of your But Why theme song whistling.
This is But Why: a Podcast for Curious Kids. I'm Jane Lindholm.
We're listening to and learning from musician and champion
whistler, Emily Eagan. Champion whistler, you say?
Graham: Hi, I'm Graham. I'm six years old. I live in Brooklyn,
New York. My question is, how do you get a trophy for whistling?
Jane: Okay, Graham actually kind of knows the answer to that he's
Emily's son. And Emily does have some whistling trophies.
Emily: I do. It's funny, I have three trophies, because in 2000
and 2001 I went to the international whistling
Jane: And weere you just playing the ukulele there with your
competition, which was in Lewisburg, North Carolina, and I
won both times. So in order to win, you have to go through a
couple rounds. It's like a sports competition, and you have
to place high in popular music, like a pop song or folk song,
and then also in classical music. So I placed in both of
those, and I went through the final rounds, and then I won. So
I have some really nice whistling trophies from that,
and it was really, really fun to do it. The two things that I
remember competing with, one of them was just a little folk
song, and you're gonna recognize this if you've ever sung this if
you've ever sung the song. I'm bringing home a baby bumblebee.
This is the folk tune that it comes with. It's called Arkansas
Traveler, and it goes like this,.
whistling?
Emily: I was playing the ukulele. You know, the ukulele
is so great because it's also a teeny, tiny instrument, and I
think it sounds really nice with whistling, as opposed to a big
instrument. So I really like to play the ukulele when I whistle.
Victoria: Hi, my name is Victoria. I live in Oakland,
California. I am six years old, and I want to know, can people
with laryngitis whistle?
Jane: If you have a sore throat or something else going on
that's making talking hard, can you still whistle?
Unknown: You know what? That is, a great question. And the answer
is yes, whistling uses something totally different. So you're not
really using your voice when you whistle like we said, you're
using your tongue and you're using the top of your mouth. So
because I sing a lot, if my throat is sore and I have
laryngitis, I can still go to rehearsal and I can still get
all the notes because I just practiced by whistling. So it's
a really great tool to have in your back pocket.
Jane: Beyond just having fun. Are there other ways that you
use whistling, Emily?
Unknown: Yeah, you know, I was a really eager music student when
I was a kid. I played a lot, but I was super, super shy to
perform. And I was especially shy either when I had to get
something perfect, like play the piano perfectly, or when I had
to sing, even though I loved to sing. And so it's funny, because
whistling became the thing that got me over my shyness. I
would, I had a neighbor who noticed that I was a good
whistler, and he would invite me to come whistle for things, you
know, always say, Emily, do that whistling thing. And I would
whistle. And I would be so scared if he were asking me to
do anything else. But because whistling just was so fun and
funny, it helped me get comfortable performing in front
of other people, it was like, Hey, I have this funny, quirky,
cool thing that no one else can do, and that I can do really
well. And even though I was shy, I had some confidence for that,
and it really helped me have, like, a breakthrough.
Jane: That's musician Emily Eagan. Before we let Emily go,
we asked if she wanted to try whistling our theme song too.
Emily: The fun thing with whistling is that you can change
the music of something. So for example, I'm going to take your
theme song, Jane, but instead of doing it fast, I'm going to do
it really slow, like this...
Unknown: I can also do it fast.
Emily: Let me give you one other option.
You know, fast and jaunty.
Jane: Fast and jaunty! I like that when you sent us your
versions of the But Why theme song you also played around with
how you wanted to do it. Some of you whistled kind of slow, and
some of you whistled kind of fast. Some of you added those
extra notes or trills to fancy it up. And some of you tried to
do it just like Luke. There were so many of you who sent us
recordings that we decided we'd try to make a But Wh kid chorus
of all your lovely voices put together? Want to hear it?
You all are amazing. Listen to that. I sent it to Luke after we
put it together, because I wanted to hear his reaction too.
Unknown: Hey, really nice job whistling. You guys sounded
great.
Jane: Luke wanted to say something else about whistling
and music as well.
Luke: Music is really cool. It's a way of us getting our ideas
across. And it doesn't just have to happen at guitar lessons or
piano lessons or at band at school. It can happen anywhere.
And there's no right way or wrong way to whistle. Just have
fun with it. And I just want to thank my friend Jane for
inviting me to be a part of this. See you later.
Jane: And I want to thank Luke Reynolds for being such a fan of
this show before we even got started, that he was willing to
let us use his awesome music as our theme song. That music has
become a big part of our show, and it's all because of Luke's
amazing musical brain and talent. Thanks as well to Emily
Egan. We'll put a link to her website in our show notes, and
thanks to Yuki Takeda for showing us how he whistles and
how you might too. That's it for this episode. If you have a
question about anything, have an adult record it. It's easy to do
on a smartphone using a voice recording app that came with the
phone. Tell us your first name, where you live, and how old you
are, and what you want us to talk about on the show. Then
email the file to questions@ButWhykids.org We love
hearing what's on your mind. But Why is produced by Melody
Bodette, she still can't whistle, but her son is trying
to teach her how and me. Jane Lindholm at Vermont Public
Radio, we're distributed by PRX. Our theme music is, as you know,
by Luke Reynolds. Special. Thanks this week to engineer
Peter Engish. We'll be back in two weeks with an all new
episode. Until then, stay curious.