FurAffinity; Whistling
Jan. 4th, 2007 08:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pyesetzI was daydreaming recently about attending the FurAffinity United convention (9-12 August 2007, Central NJ). I imagined sitting in the lobby with my laptop, whistling for several hours until something decent finally came out. Of course, that would never happen. ("Creating a public disturbance", yadda yadda.)
Today I was reading Stephen Dubner's blogpost about Canada, which led me to Jessica Simpson, which led to Dolly Parton and also Talk:Jessica Simpson, which led to Whistle Register (a.k.a. flageolet). Yes, I'll do anything to avoid paying work!
Anyway, the whistle-singing I used to do in college is not like "Mariah Carey hitting a C8 note". It was much lower-pitched and more akin to ventriloquism: forming consonants with the back of my throat while the front made whistly noises. A few times I tried switching from whistling to singing, but found that to make the same note the usual way required a complete rearrangement of my mouth parts. Perhaps I could achieve that with practice. Making the same whistle-note on inhale and exhale requires a rearrangement of mouth-parts, but I got that down pat years ago.
Today I was reading Stephen Dubner's blogpost about Canada, which led me to Jessica Simpson, which led to Dolly Parton and also Talk:Jessica Simpson, which led to Whistle Register (a.k.a. flageolet). Yes, I'll do anything to avoid paying work!
Anyway, the whistle-singing I used to do in college is not like "Mariah Carey hitting a C8 note". It was much lower-pitched and more akin to ventriloquism: forming consonants with the back of my throat while the front made whistly noises. A few times I tried switching from whistling to singing, but found that to make the same note the usual way required a complete rearrangement of my mouth parts. Perhaps I could achieve that with practice. Making the same whistle-note on inhale and exhale requires a rearrangement of mouth-parts, but I got that down pat years ago.
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Date: 2007-01-05 04:47 am (UTC)I'm not very good with whistling :(
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Date: 2007-01-06 04:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-07 02:28 am (UTC)Actually, there was a different app, back on NextStep, which had a graphical representation of the profile of the various speech cavities, and permitted playing around with their sizes and profiles.. I should try digging around for the name of that, and see if it could be updated for OS X (aka OpenStep, The Apple Generation).
So you're an accomplished Tuva style throat singer? We require a phone post!
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Date: 2007-01-07 03:32 am (UTC)Praat seems interesting, but I have no Mac to run it on.
So you're an accomplished Tuva style throat singer? We require a phone post!
Was. That was 1987-89, when I was a grad student sharing an office with three other students, one of whom was a double-PhD in music. Laptops hadn't been invented yet, so there are no recordings of my work. These days I rarely whistle in public, except sometimes at the grocery store. Once in a blue moon a fellow customer will be moved to burst into song as I pass by.
I may be buying a replacement laptop real soon now. This time I'm going to insist that the built-in mic must be supported by Linux. Maybe I can get my groove back.
"Phone posts" are limited to 4 KHz, so whistling would sound like crap. I'd probably just upload an MP3 someplace.