Science Friday - You Can Whistle While You Work—But How Does A Whistle Work?

Episode Date: July 31, 2025

Whistling is a skill used to communicate over distances—a whistle can mean anything from “you’re cute” to “time to come home for dinner.” There’s a complex series of mechanisms in the mouth that need to come together to make a whistle. Hosts Ira Flatow and Flora Lichtman discuss all things whistling with professional musician and whistler Wanda Civic, aka MCP, and speech language pathologist Aaron Johnson.Guests: Wanda Civic aka MCP is a musician and whistler based in New York, New York.Aaron Johnson is a speech and language pathologist at the Voice Center of New York University, in New York, New York.Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hey, I'm Flora Lickman. And I'm Ira Flato, and you're listening to Science Friday. Today in the show, The Science of Whistling. No, this is not the Andy Griffith show that you're listening to. For the rest of the hour, we're going to be talking about whistling. Anyone who's trying to learn how to make a powerful whistle knows it's not as easy as just putting your lips together and blowing. It's like an instrument. It takes practice. Flora, are you a good whistler?

I am not. No, I am not. But I do love that Kill Bill song. Okay. Let me introduce my guests who are going to talk us through the science of a good whistle. Wanda Civic, whose stage name is MCP, currently training for the Masters of Musical Whistling. Who knew? She's based here in our New York studios. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much for having me. You're welcome, Dr. Aaron Johnson, a speech-language pathologist and co-director of NYU Langone's Voice Center in New York, New York. Welcome to Science Friday. Great to be here. Nice to have you both. Wanda, you're a professional whistler. How do you get into a job like that? Well, getting into any kind of

music job, you just got to show up and make some noise. And if they ask you to come back and they give you some money for it, you're a pro. Do you have to choose an audition whistle? I mean, it depends on the gig. Personally, I started whistling around the city through jazz. You know, you can take a solo on any instrument, and I just started doing it on the whistle. And I've never respected what a saxophone play had to say about me until he said he liked my horn playing. And you're training for what? Masters of Musical Whistling. Yeah, there's actually two global competitions. One of them is in Tokyo, but this next one, Masters of Musical Whistling, will take place in Hollywood in October. And there's four divisions,

if you can believe that, four different ways to compete. Can't let you sit there without giving us a little taste of your whistling. Oh, I would love to. Give us a little... How about... Sweet Georgia Brown. Hey. I'm a Globetrotters fan.

I've heard that many, many times. Yeah, the listeners at home can't see me spinning the basketball. Aaron, you're an expert when it comes to vocal performance. What's actually happening in the mouth when we whistle? That's right. So, Wanda is a singer, and there's a lot of similarities between how we shape our, what we call our vocal tract, which is essentially the space above our vocal folds in the back of the throat and our mouth.

A lot of similarities between singing and whistling. So in singing, the vocal folds is what create the sound, and that sound then bounces around in our vocal tract and depending on the shape and size of our vocal tract determined by our tongue and our lips and our jaw position will have different resonances. And the same kind of thing happens when we whistle, except the sound source, instead of being at the back,

the vocal folds, it's at the front at the lips. So that narrowing of the lips creates a stream of air, which makes turbulence. And then the resonance within the mouth is determined by, again, the shape and size of that vocal tract or the mouth. Now, there's the regular whistling, the kind that Wanda was doing. But when I was a kid, these kids who could put their fingers in their mouth and just go crazy, either a ballgame or something. How different is the physics of that? Very similar.

I mean, any sort of whistle, and there's lots of different mechanisms of whistling. But essentially, we need some sort of high stream jet of air. And when you put your fingers in your mouth, you get a more rigid opening and you can have a very high velocity airstream, which is what then correlates with that louder, really piercing whistle. I saw you shaking your head. In disgust, it looked like. Well, there's just so many ways to whistle. It's true. And to me, it's like all mystery meat because you can't see it. I don't know how to teach it because I just all. always have been whistling, but I know I can whistle in, I can whistle out, maybe to reach

different notes or to do different styles. So it's something I've been exploring through my musical career is the different ways to make sound that way. Can you teach people to whistle? I mean, or is it just a natural thing? I have not been able to learn when someone's tried to teach me another way, like with the fingers in the mouth. I can do it with my hands like the whoo-woo, you know, that kind. But I have to take all my rings off to get a, tight seal. But I think it's really difficult in the same way that it can be difficult to teach voice because everyone is built differently. The dimensions of everybody's mouths and throats are all different. Maybe the way that you, you know, your lifestyle, if you, you know, are not a water

drinker, you know, that can affect your ability to whistle as well. So. Yeah. Yeah. Did you find you can teach anybody? I haven't never tried, but I think it's like singing and that a lot of people just figure it out as they're growing up. And like many skills, if we're, we haven't explored and played around when we're a kid and discovered how to do something, it's a lot harder to do when we're an adult. All right. Speaking of, let's go to the phones. Let's go to Jay and Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Hi, Jay. Hey, how's it going, Ira? Hi, there. Go ahead. Hey, so back when I was a little kid, my dad would go sit outside in his, like, various locations, like these little fires next to his, you know, those old plastic, very breakable if you sit down too hard on them, chairs. And I would come outside, like after dinner, you know, sunsets, want to come hang out with him.

He did be out there smoking his cigars. And we had our call-and-response whistle. I would go outside, you know, the front or back door. And then I would get a response from him. And I would, you know, figure out which side of the yard he was sitting at and go find him. Wow. That's interesting because I have noticed as you have that there's a certain emotion attached to different kinds of whistles, right? Yeah. My grandpa had a real loud one. Totally, yeah. Yeah.

My grandfather had a real loud one. He would shoot out at shows, you know, as his great applause. Or my dad had, we also had a call in response if I got lost in the grocery store. You know, he'd go, and I'd go, and then we would find each other. Did you use it? Yeah. Still do. You do. Yeah. What about the wolf whistle, you know? Oh, like, Yeah. Oh, well, you know, on a good day, I don't hear it, but I don't have that many good days. What do you mean on a good day, you don't hear?

Oh, I mean, you know, who wants to be heckled. But, you know, there's all kinds of, you know, you could call a cab that way. Right. And people try to imitate birds. Totally. Right. But you have to do it ethically, though. I learned recently that you really have to be aware of how you're using.

bird whistles because they work and it can confuse the birds. Really? Yeah. In the birdwatching community. Do you have like a trail of birds following you at all times? I will say I was practicing Sweet Georgia Brown for today and running through the botanical gardens and figured that by the end of my run, all the birds would be whistling like the Harlem Globetrotters.

Don't go away because when we come back, the whistles that rats make. We are talking about the art and science of whistling. Should we go to the phones? Let's go to Jamal in Huntsville, Alabama. Hi. Go for it. Yes, I have adult children now. They'd be embarrassed for this.

But my son in particular, when he was a little boy, we'd be in the backyard, and birds would be making their calls, and I would imitate them, and he thought it was the coolest thing. And I'd go, and he thought it was just so cool, man. Wow. Wanda, you recognize that one? Yeah, that's something I've even observed in musical. whistling, that ability to warble.

Like, doodooly, doodily, doodil. And there's a term in brass playing or instrument playing called doodle tonguing, I believe. And I think just using my brain that you must be able to doodle tongue while you're whistling to make some of those warbly sounds. I have been exploring it, but I haven't been able. I'm not a master of that yet. I think a theme that's coming through is that there are a lot of different species that use the whistle to communicate, humans, birds.

In fact, in some of the work that I do, I study the ultrasonic vocalizations of rats, which are produced with a whistle. Let me back you up on that. Tell us about that. So rats communicate with each other using ultrasonic vocalizations well above our range of hearing. We can hear up to about 20 kilohertz. And these vocalizations are 50 kilohertz, even up to 100 kilohertz. So way above what we can hear.

And they use that to indicate interest in mating, rough and tumble play, mother pup location. and it's produced using a whistle within the larynings. So it's a little different mechanism, though, the way humans produce either their vocalizations or whistles. We actually have a clip of that, so let's listen to that. Wow, that's in the range we can hear it, though. So that clip, we recorded with special equipment that's ultrasonic, and then for that clip, I slowed down the vocalizations

so that they were within our range of hearing. So they're normally on the order of maybe 10 to 50 milliseconds. They go by very quickly, and we can't hear them. So those were slowed down. And why were you interested in this question? Yeah, so the primary thing that I research is the voice and how the voice changes as we get older and particularly the muscles inside of the larynx. And so to study those in ways that we can't do in humans, I use this rat model, and we look at changes in the acoustic features of the vocalizations,

and then we look at the changes in the muscle and soft with aging and also with vocal training. We actually train the rats to increase how much they're vocalizing. Really? We use that as a model of vocal exercise, so we know that as we get older, all of our muscles atrophy, and one thing we've seen in the limbs is that exercise can help keep us strong. And so our research is looking to see if we can do the same thing with the muscles of the voice. Let's go to the phones to Christopher. Hi, in North Carolina. Welcome to Science Friday.

Well, hello. Thanks for taking my call. You're welcome. Go ahead. I'm so glad to be with you. So I live in Raleigh, North Carolina, and I grew up. up a drive from here over in Greenville. And when I was growing up and, you know, you still let your kids run around the neighborhood all day until dark, we would listen for my dad's whistle across the neighborhood.

And, you know, it wasn't, he wouldn't purse his lips where he wouldn't stick his finger in his mouth. He would lay his tongue down the floor of his mouth and kind of make it a little more rigid across the bottom lip. and then just pull his jaw back a little bit, and he had the most piercing whistle that would call us from two blocks away. You've got to see us here in the studio trying to do that. Everyone's got their tongue back out of their mouths. And, I mean, I can sort of make the sound, but it was much louder. Sort of, you know, just really piercing loud, and it would call us home for dinner.

Wow. That's a great story. Thanks for sharing. And, you know, my dad just passed away a couple of months ago, so it was really nice to hear your program and just instantly remember that whistle. Well, condolences to you and your family, and thanks for sharing. Wanda, is there a limit to what you can do with whistling? I have found that it's the closest I've ever gotten to be able. I play other instruments, and my whole life I've felt that I'm trying to keep up with my voice because that's my primary instrument. I've done the most

work on that, but the whistling is the closest I can get to my voice. So I'm, I, I guess, I, I, I, I, can't think of anything I can't do unless it's just too high or too low. Well, there's, you know, the Beyonce song Love on Top. There's a bunch of key changes. Is that like outside of the realm of whistling? No. Actually, I was practicing that song for my Masters of Musical Whistling Competition because I thought it would be a nice impressive, you know.

I ended up finding a karaoke track for that song that was just a little bit set a little bit lower because where she hits all the way at the end. It's right at the top. Can we hear a little bit of it? Oh, yeah. You can't come here and tell us that. Let's see. Baby, it's you.

Wow. You know, so on and so forth. She keeps going. Definitely any vocal things that I'm able to do, I'm able to replicate it with my whistle, which is something that's been so exciting for me as a performer who sometimes is doing like three, four, four, five, six-hour shows, I can give myself a break by switching to the whistle. It's less

fatiguing. I actually discovered my, or I think really beefed up my skills as a child because I've been singing my whole life. But before I really knew how to take care of my voice, I would lose it all the time by yelling or singing too hard. And when I lose my voice, I can still whistle. And when I lose my voice, I still have to learn my music. So I would whistle my music. I think it helped with my sight reading and everything. But I, I I think that's how I was able to approach it like my voice because it just replaced it when I wasn't able to sing. Erin, have you done voice work? Yeah, actually, my first career, I was a professional singer and teacher of singing in Chicago for about a decade.

So I trained at Northwestern University and actually a classmate of mine, Jay Winston, was the 2023 Masters Whistling Champion as well. So I was familiar with the competition. Yeah, small vocal whistling world. Do you want to sing love on top? No. I appreciate the offer. It's been about 20 years since I've, and I never really sang that genre. How's your whistling? My whistling's okay. And I think it's probably because there's a lot of similarities, again, in the control that we have over our vocal tract, in positioning the tongue and getting this kind of precise placement in order to produce resonance, which is what creates the frequency of the whistle. When you make a whistle out of a piece of wood, what do you have to do to make that into a whistle?

Yeah, so in humans we have the lips, which is where we have the constriction for that air jet, in something like a flute or a recorder or wood whistle, usually what the mechanism is is an edge. So there's an opening that you blow the air across, and when that airstream hits that opposing edge, then it splits and oscillates. And that's what creates the frequency. So you need some sort of hole that has an opening that you're blowing across or blowing into, and then that's striking the other edge. You can think of sort of like a bottle of water

or something that has an opening and if you blow across the top, you know, you can get the tone. That's that the space inside of the bottle resonating and it's the sound source is that air blowing across and hitting the edge. And you know you have to get the bottle just at the right angle and the airflow

focused in just the right way at the right speed in order to get that resonance to happen. Well, Wanda, is there some kind of whistle you can't do that you want to learn. Like I said, those warblings are really crazy. It really sounds like you're playing an instrument when they're able to like flip the notes like that. Like I'm trying to use my tongue in there.

It sounds kind of buddy. I'm hearing a lot of Disney. You know what those birds in Disney? And Wanda's going to play us out as we had to think. We run out of time. I want to thank both of you for taking time to be with us. Wanda Civic, whose stage name is MCP, currently training for the Masters of Musical Whistling. She's based in New York, Dr. Aaron Johnson, a speech language pathologist and co-director of NYU

Langone's Voice Center in New York, New York. Thank you both. Thank you so much. I'd be with us today. Thanks for listening. If you like the show, rate and review us wherever you listen, or just go straight to guerrilla marketing. Take a friend's phone and subscribe them to this podcast. I'm Flora Lichtenen. And I'm Ira Flato. Thanks for listening.