Why can’t we whistle high notes? I’m talking about pucker your lips and blow whistling, not fingers-in-the-mounth whistling. Start whistling and work your way up the scale, you won’t get very far!
With God as my witness, I thought turkey’s could fly.
Without going into much detail, the range of sound frequency (i.e. pitch) you can produce by whistling is limited by the physiology of your body, mainly the mouth and your airway.
I can’t think of a really good analogy right now, so I’ll just give you a not so good one: the production of sound by blowing air pass one end of a tube. You’ll notice that shorter tubes will generate higher sounds. If anyone has a better analogy, please contribute.
Thanks!
Lip tightness. Can’t squeeze the opening small enough.
On the other hand, I can whistle between my front two teeth to a pitch so high I cannot hear it.
I checked it on an oscilloscope. A nearly perfect sine wave.
If I start low and go high, it sounds much like a camera flash warming up. Great for confusing dogs.
Can’t whistle, never have been able to, thousands have tried to teach me, to no avail. I have always wondered why my mother would tell my brothers not to whistle in the house, it was ‘not nice’. Anyone else’s Mom think this, I never asked her to explain this and sadly she’s gone now.
Actually, my brother and I were told that whistling meant someone was about to get into a fight, or something wierd like that.
They’re from India, so I don’t know what the origin of that is.
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”
-H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
Elbows: How old are you? If you’ve been trying for 40 years, and still can’t whistle, then you probably won’t ever be able to. But, I tried to whistle my entire life, until I was 20. (I’m 22 now) One day, I was able to make a very small sound, barely audible. So, I looked in a mirror, to see what I did. I copied that face, and practiced a million slight variations, and eventually was able to whistle. Took me 20 years, but I now whistle all day, non stop.
Back to the OP. I don’t know about whistling high notes, but my range is about three octaves. Is that average?
Adam
“Life is hard…but God is good”