This post is half April Fools and half serious question.
Has anyone ever made an electric whistle? Instead of finger holes, there could be six electric keys that would control a synthisizer. Volume would be controlled by blowing into a mouthpiece that has a pressure sensor.
Advantages- one whistle could be programed to play in any key from low, low, low all the way up to silent dog whistle. And, it would be small enough to make low whistle availabe to people with small hands or carpel tunnel problems. A commercially viable product would be programable to imitate various instruments. A pocket bassoon would be too cool!
Or maybe I’m too crazy. Has anyone ever made such a beast?
ive thought aobut that before… another advantage would be that you could plug headphones into something like that so you could play in public, at night, on the train whatever and not bother onyone (or you can jsut do that witha regular whistle and bother everyone, either way)
Would this really be any more appealing than setting your electronic keyboard on a whistle-like setting?
To my taste, such a thing would completely lack the acoustic charm of an air-blown whistle.
And if it’s electronic…why stick it in your mouth at all–there would be no need to blow. Which brings me back to the keyboard comparison.
Other thoughts?..not trying to be a curmudgeonly wet blanket…
This may not be so crazy after all. If they can do it for piano keyboard, they can do it for wind instruments. The only glitch would be convincing a manufacturer that there is enough market. Whistlers may be too small a group, but a wider group would buy if the fingering were programable for difforent instruments. The full version would have recorder fingering, but could be programmed to let whistlers use the first six keys and trumpeters could use the first three keys.
What your talking about is a wind controller. It doesn’t have to be invented it exists. It has been discussed here before. I believe if you search the site for wind controller you will find a discussion. But traditional music is acoustic not electric.
Designed to replicate a saxophone, the Yamaha WX5 wind controller priced at $600 makes no sound of it’s own but sends MIDI signals to a tone module that creates sound.
Yamaha created a monophonic acoustic tone generator model VL70M that is the most natural sounding tone generator. Thought it was released several years ago, they have yet to release a newer version.
The two units with connecting cable is over $1,200US
Electronic bagpipe chanters have been around for years. The problem with such a whistle is two-fold.
1, Unlike pipes, decent whistles are cheap. There’s no financial advantage, and certainly none of the guilty pleasure that comes from buying a new whistle every few wfeeks or months just to have something different.
Pipes are, as I understand it anyway, basically one octave instruments. A good whistle can do three. For me the hardest part of whistling is not hitting the right keys, it’s the breath control you have to learn in order to make it sound consistently like you want it to sound. I don’t see how you’d get that training/learning from a touchpad.
After looking at what’s on the net, I think I would only buy if the product were more portable, a little less costly, and used the same finguring as other instruments that I am interested in playing.
There is one possibility. The acoustic penny whistle.
He has a patent on the microphone in the recorder head. Someone would have to make improvements or a total different design that would not infringe on his patent.
