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 When I had originally made the whistles, I had chosen to use just my hands, thinking "Of course the ancient Peruvians didn't have popsicle sticks!"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!