It’s weird and frustrating. I can match tones, harmonize, and do all kinds of complex musical things…when whistling. But my singing is garbage. I search for notes (and rarely find them) and can only do the simplest harmonies, and then only in a select few circumstances, when singing.
I wonder why. Is it just that whistling is a much simpler exercise, mechanistically speaking? Is it processed in a different part of the brain?
I wanna sing, dammit! Whistling can go hang! I want a glorious, controlled singing voice.
Same here. I’ve always chalked it up to mechanical control. In both pursed-lip and flat-tongue whistling (can’t think of better names for the two styles) I have almost unlimited fine control over the sounds I can make. But my physical control over my vocal chords is abysmal. It’s about the same as the right hand/left hand dichotomy in handwriting. Both hands ‘know’ what they’re supposed to do, but one has the physical ability whereas one doesn’t.
Of course, that may fall apart a bit given that the two hands are (urban legendarily?) controlled by different halves of the brain…
My guess is that it has to do with the location of the sound source. Singing originates in the throat, whistling at the edge of the lips. Very internal vs. nearly completely external. The acoustics of the skull messes up how people hear themselves. That’s why people are surprised by their recorded voice. Whistling not so much.
Also note that your voice and how your brain processes it starts off at a very early age. Whistling comes later so the way the brain processes it develops later. Our brains do a really great job of munging a lot of sensory input. Not always in the best way.
My WAG is singing takes far more muscles, coordinating them takes a lot more practice, like comparing kazoo to piano skills. And hearing the correct pitch is not enough, I know what a good golf swing looks like so you’d think I should be able to get the fucking ball off the tee. But you’d be wrong.
Stupid question: have you practiced a lot with your voice? I tried singing, thought I stunk and let it go. I tried guitar, thought I stunk, but stuck with it and over the decades :eek: have gotten much better. What’s funny is that given my current band situation, I am singing more, so I have had to apply myself and actually…practice. And I have begun to see where there are things I can work on to take my (admittedly weak) instrument and improve upon it.
Perhaps you simply haven’t practiced enough at getting control over your vocal cords and directing them to the correct pitch while singing vs. whistling?
When you say perfect pitch, do you mean that someone could say whistle the note A, and you could do it? Or do you mean you can carry a tune whistling, or match a tone played on a piano? That’s normally called relative pitch.
I had a music professor who claimed it was impossible to be a good whistler, but a bad singer. His point was that both perfect pitch and relative pitch are part of your hearing, not your sound producing. I’ve always wondered about this, since I consider myself a bad singer, but often rise to levels of mediocrity with whistling. There’s also the case of Evelyn Glennie, a deaf musician who claims to “feel” the music she’s producing, rather than hearing it. If that’s true, then it would make sense that the ability to produce music one way wouldn’t necessarily transfer to the ability to produce it a different way.
I agree about the singing lessons, and if I may, I’d like to ask a related question: if you’re a guy, is it better to take lessons from a guy rather than a lady?
My last lessons were from a lady, and they only lasted 4 weeks, so I couldn’t tell, really, but I was able to follow her pretty much up and down the scale, and I still have the practice cd she made and use it every now and then.