MY
FIRST WHISTLE
Roberto
Velázquez Cabrera
First version
Fig. 1.
A copy of my first whistle
The objective of this paper is to provide
more details of my first aerophone, included In a
previous study [1].
More than 50 years ago, I made my first
aerophone with a "corcholata" (metallic cup
for soda and beer bottles), flattened, bended and with two holes near the
center, like the one shown in Figure 1. The metallic plug (with out the cork),
was lightly flattened with a hammer and then laid (with a chewed gum) on a
railroad track, to be very well flattened by the iron wheels. Then, with a
nail, two holes were made, opposite and equidistant from the center. Kids from
my home town used to play with this "zumbador"
(buzzer) or "gallito" (little cock),
operated with a long cord introduced in the holes and loop tied. The cord was
sustained with the annular fingers of both hands, with a circular movement the
cord was twisted and when it was stretched and relaxed the flattened plug
rotated to a great velocity in one direction and in the contrary. The game was
between two players, face to face, to cut the cord of the adversary. These toys
folded (with out the cord and with the two holes located in a near distance
face to face) could be converted in other very noisy toy. The new play was a
competition to see who could make the loudest sound. This sound is very rich in
components of high frequencies, maybe due to its special small simple,
flattened and open resonating chamber and its two holes of small length (or
thickness of the wall).
Some years ago, when I started the study of
Mexican aerophones, I realized that these toys were similar (considering the
sounding mechanism) to those used in Ancient Mexico (actual zone from south of
Fig. 2.
Florentine Codex.
Book
XII. Mixcoacalli Instruments. Lam. 70
Jorge Dájer
included in his book [2] a picture of a Purepecha
bone aerophone, called by him "ocarina" (Figure 3). It is very
similar to the aerophone of Florentine Codex.
º
Fig. 3.
Ocarina from Araró (Dajer´s
Picture)
It seems that similar whistles were used in
several zones of the world. In an Armagaud´s book [3]
it is a comment on "siffets":
"Les
enfants turcs font des sifflets analogues avec une capsule de bouteille
aplatie, pliée en deux à 30° environ et percée de
part en part avec un clou, environ au tiers du rayon qui est à angle droit de
pliure. Ces sifflet existent aussi en poterie (Amérique du Sud) ou en ivoire (Groënland)."
The sound can be analyzed with the 2D
spectrogram of Figure 4. There are loud colored noise signals in the range of 2
kHz to 7 kHz.
Fig. 4.
Spectrogram in 2 dimensions.
The power spectrum is shown in Figure 5. The
big crests of the sound are shown more clearly.
The description of the sounding mechanism
and the functioning of the whistle is very similar to
the Black Stone Aerophone [1].
References
- Velázquez-Cabrera, Roberto, "Black stone aerophone". The
Spanish version of this paper was presented in the Computing International
Conference CIC-2000, held in the National Politecnic
Institute,
- Dájer,
Jorge. "Los artefactos Sonoros
Precolombinos, Desde su Descubrimiento en Michoacan", FONCA-ELA. México. 1995.
- Armengaud, Cristine, "Musique Vertes", 3. Ed. Cristine Bonneton Editeur, 1984. ISBN 2-862353-044-1. This reference was provided
by Uli Wahl. He is an expert and has a paper on the (Sifflets Ardennais en Pierre
) site on
Kite (Aeolian) Musical Instruments