Tinkering

As promised, today I sat down and really focused on getting those whistles to work. It's hard to imagine such small objects taking so long to form and complete, but as it turns out there is a seemingly infinite array of minute adjustments and combinations of adjustments that can be made to get a whistle to work - or slip farther and farther from making a clear sound, as was the case with one or two of my little would-be instruments.

And what precisely was it, that needed to be done? Well, all of my whistles needed sharper edges for the air to flow over. When I had originally made the whistles, I had chosen to use just my hands, thinking "Of course the ancient Peruvians didn't have popsicle sticks!" This was silly of me, though, because I quickly realized that in order to get the straight edges and well-formed holes that make a whistle work, they probably did use some sort of tool. I'm not sure what that was, but something popsicle stick-like definitely has its appeal. I ended up using one of the needles common in the pottery studio, as well as a wooden scraping stick. Funny how we identify tools - seems to me we're only really likely to understand something as a tool if we've had occasion to use it or something very like it before.

One two of my whistles I chose to attach mouth pieces, though they all eventually worked - or sort-of worked - without them. The mouthpieces definitely complicated things; with those, I had to worry about how big all the openings were, how clear the air passageway was, where it was aiming, etc. Two turned out to be more than enough to occupy my time! Most of the whistle-building sites (see below) suggest making the mouth piece and whistle at once, which definitely makes sense. However, I had no way of knowing at the beginning which whistle (or how many) I'd want for my whistling vessel(s). By now, though, things are definitely starting to take shape!

How to Make a Ceramic Whistle

This was a whistle I made by splicing together two halves of a sphere. You can see the dividing line pretty clearly! However, this did not seem to affect the sound coming out of the whistle.

For this whistle, I tried to avoid the halves approach by molding the body around my thumb a bit and pulling it closed after. While the inside is smoother on the whole, it does have that ugly notch on it, and the sides are pretty irregular. Personally, I'd favor the other approach.

A top-down view of one of my whistle+mouth piece creations . . . The result of a lot of small adjustments!

Well, I Guess That Was a Good Thing . . .

I came in today to two important things - one a surprise, and one not. I had rather suspected as I left last time that the bottom of the vessel I'd been working on would be difficult to continue work on today, and to be honest I had almost expected to find that, in drying, the clay had collapsed in some areas, rendering the start a good learning exercise but definitely not a final product. More relieved that disappointed, I sat down to make another vessel body, this time intent on finishing the main chamber instead of leaving it open.

As I worked, the real surprise came: Kay gave me a folderful of information about making clay whistles, complete with troubleshooting info. (Maybe my endless and mostly futile attempts to produce sound last week had been louder - or more annoying - than I had thought? ;~D Haha, probably not, but the information definitely came at a good time.) This was an excellent help to me, and something that hadn't particularly occurred to me to look for in my research, silly as that sounds. After all, whistle technology probably hasn't changed much over years and cultures (though if it has that'd be very interesting). And I doubt that pottery was ever necessarily an entirely individual process, given the widespread use of common cultural patterns and forms.

All told, I ended the day well with a respectable vessel, coiled up to a rounded top with two openings. The coiling was an assumption on my part, and also a reflection of my limitations - I really wasn't sure how else it'd be made, and couldn't find such a thing mentioned in any of my books. I guess it's another one of those questions that comes up during "experimenting" that didn't seem so important before, yet reveals how much we see past products and processes through the lens of what we know in the present. In any case, I am now armed with new information and ready to make some working whistles the next time around.

Craftsmanship

I spent most of my time in the pottery studio today in complete wonder - at times bordering on desperate bewilderment - at the things that humanity has discovered the ability to make. More importantly, the process of turning that one-time possibility into a consistent skill impressed me.

Because, if there's one thing I can be pretty sure of after today, it's that even just making whistles (let alone whistling vessels) took a lot of tinkering for the first groups of people. And I wonder how they got the idea to begin, because it seems to me that hollow spheres with holes just so and air ducts perfectly cleared weren't really being made for many other purposes, which makes it difficult to believe the idea of a whistle arose by mistake. Perhaps experience with certain shells prompted the idea? Of course, I'm merely speculating, and a bit wildly at that; but I wish I could know what precisely was going through the minds of the first people to make these awesome vessels. That process of innovation is so human, and yet so often inscrutable in hindsight.

I may have mentioned this with the Jomon pots, but the amount of effort and perfectionism that must have gone into some of these ancient creations is crazy. I began trying to make the body of my whistling vessel today, seeing what it would be like to coil it, but also trying to make it as presentable as possible . . . And it was tough. Every once in a while (perhaps increasingly so that farther I got into the project!) a little part of me would mention, "You know, the vessel will still hold water, even if its sides aren't smooth . . ." The same thing would happen as I tried to get my now-solid whistles to sound: "Well, that was pretty close to a note - you could hear that from across the room - so what if it's a little airy?"  The standards of the pots we've found, however, are much higher than these; that, or with rose-tinted glasses, we perceive it to be so. I wonder if there was a lot of experimentation and "good-enough" pottery, that perhaps we haven't been as likely to find, or that was more likely to be broken? Or perhaps pottery was important enough that everything truly did have to be perfect in order to find use. Whatever the reason, I remain very impressed by what those long before me have accomplished - on the whole, they were far more skilled than I.