The curious case of whistled languages and their lack of left-brain dominance | Hacker News Reader

The curious case of whistled languages and their lack of left-brain dominance

arstechnica.com

65 pointsshawndumas16 comments

It's really interesting how this type of communication works, you can read up about the details on Wikipedia [1].

Also, this page [2] has some cool examples of sine-wave speech that you can listen to in order to understand how people can understand whistled speech.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language [2] http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/sine-wave-spe...

Link 2, that's pure magic. I recommend to everyone, just listen the files in the order given.

Interestingly in the first audio example of [2] I was able to understand the sentence before listening to the clear version. I've heard other examples of this phenomenon before (perhaps these exact examples on NPR?) and I recall definitely not making it out then, so maybe something was stuck in my brain the first time.

After listening only to the first one about four or five times, I made out "It was a funny day when the children were going to the park." Even after priming with the clear version, "sunny" still sounds like "funny," although the other text was much clearer.

Wow, I listened to this several months ago and I am still primed on the first sentence.

Sine-wave speech reminds me of R2D2 from Star Wars. Does anyone know if sine-wave speech was used as an inspiration? Maybe R2D2 actually says coherent sentences in the movies, but we aren't used to that form of speech interpretation

I doubt it, only given that the sine-wave stuff I've seen is from way after the Star Wars movies. I don't think it was a concept in the 70s, but if you can find some resources, post em!

I understood the first, third, and fifth sentence on the first listen, except that just like jcranmer I misheard "sunny." Listened to the two remaining sentences several times, and finally decided that the second one had to be "the animal jumped in the cage of the zoo", which wasn't too far off and funnily enough persisted even after I had heard the real sample. I misunderstood the fourth completely: "<unintelligible> stayed until lunch time", but heard it clearly after listening to the correct version.

English is my second language though, I wonder if that makes any difference? For example I'd guess that compared to a native speaker, I'd have to pay more attention to the stream of sounds to determine where each word ends and the next begins. Perhaps just by expecting to hear an English sentence I automatically increased my level of attention?

I'm going to ask someone to create a few sentences in my native language to see if there's any difference, although the fact that I've now been exposed to the concept of sine-wave speech has probably in itself altered my perception of future examples.

That is the coolest thing I've seen all week, and I actually got #4! Awesome.

I'm multi-lingual, and I only "perceived" the sine wave audio after being primed with the clear speech. Kind of feels like the human tendency to pattern match faces in everything around us. I like I forced myself to transform the sine wave speech in my head to match the clear speech I just heard. Very interesting that some people pick this up faster than others.

I wonder if they also studied this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbo_Gomero

Not in this study, but the actual article, linked at the bottom, does refer to an earlier study on the whistled language of La Gomera.

Also, Wikipedia says that Silbo Gomero is "one of the best-studied whistling languages".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boatswain%27s_call

I wonder if the boatswain calls count as a whistled language?

I heard this yesterday on NPR, and wondered if singing is processed similarly. It's another phenomenon that is half-music, half-language.

Singing does use a different part of the brain than speech and it would be interesting to know if it's similar to listening to whistling.

Someone in my family used to stutter badly but their singing has always been flawless

Not surprising. That was the same case with John Paul Larkin whose stage name Scatman John[1] probably rings a few bells. Although his style of singing lent itself well to (ab)use of stuttering. Very curious how that works, though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scatman_John

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