The Mechanism of Whistle Production

Abstract

As far as can be ascertained, the mechanism of whistle production by the human mouth, except in the case of the bilabial method, has failed to attract the attention of physicists. A brief discussion of the question may therefore not be amiss. Information on the bilabial type will be found in VON GIERKE’s [35] article. It may be added that one kind of bird-call, which imitates the blackbird’s song, seems to function much in the same way as the mouth in a labial whistle. Like it, it works equally well on expiration and inspiration, that is to say, it is immaterial whether the initiator precedes or follows the resonator/filter along the path of the air stream, the two arrangements producing acoustically indistinguishable results. All the other whistling techniques are different in this respect; they work only on expiration. A glance at the accompanying sketches will show the close similarity between the geometry of the bird call in use and that of the mouth emitting a bilabial whistle (Figs.24,25,26,27).