Walden’s Ocarina post was my first ever link to hand cooing. My wife said she knew about hand cooing her whole life. She was surprised I hadn’t heard of this. Her first boyfriend could do this. She thought it was a Native American thing because his whole family could do this. Her last husband is going to learn how to do this too. Starting today. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.
I have always heard it referred to a loon call.
Check out this link. It’s way more than a loon call.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hzqY0ckN_g&feature=related
Yep saw the clip, I have just never heard it called hand cooing.
That’s what I’m going to call it I am. I’m a social worker. I need to stay away from the word “loon”. Not politically correct.
That was especially cool, but I didn’t hear an ocarina, just a pair of tenor records. Did the poster confuse the recorder for an ocarina, or did I miss it?
Oh, I think I get it. The player’s hands are working like a vessel flute, right? They become a Helmholtz resonator of variable volume?
And talk about the ultimate low-cost instrument! A very musical sound and it costs nothing at all. Very cool!
I’d go with confused poster “This is a nice video I found on the internet.”
Nevertheless, PC or not, your call is what it is and it worked like a charm: Denny showed up. 
I learned to do this from another junior counsellor at boy scout camp in about 1979. He could play melodies, but all I’ve been able to get is the basic hooty noise.
not my fault you slept in an’ got here late
Overslept? Dude. I was hunkered down in the rushes, eyes to the skies. 
I’ve gotten kaka.
I’ve always known this (hand ocarina, sound generated by an inverted transverse flute type embouchure formed between the thumbs) as “owl-calling”. I learnt to do it as a primary school child - can’t recall if taught by a peer at school or by an adult - probably the former - so it was current in playground culture in the West Country of England in the 1960s. It is mentioned (as “making an owl-call”) in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books - and if memory serves I think he may have attributed it either to Amerindian or Aussie Aboriginal culture… We made mimic owl and wood pigeon and cuckoo calls by this method, and in my teens I learned, rather approximately, to play The Archers theme tune thus as a joke/to annoy my mother! Whenever The Archers came on the radio my brother and I would whip our hands together and “play along” cacophonously… (I can still “do” it… 
- ask benhall1!)
Latterly, with the first mobile phone I got that could record sound and utilise the file recorded, I recorded myself making three “cuckoo” calls thus and set it up as my incoming text alert (texts are daft, so it seemed appropriate!) and I still have (a re-rendition) as my rather unique text alert to this day. It’s great when I’m in work as a taxi driver with a fare aboard and a text comes in and this “cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo” emanates from my breast pocket . 
When my son was about 7 or 8, in junior school, about 10 years ago, I taught him and his older sisters to do it and he went off to school and taught all his mates, none of whom had encountered it so far as he could report (so it seems not to have been current in NE Wales around the turn of the millenium) - the school had an epidemic of it! 
(P.S. the audio file linked above is an AMR file - doesn’t preview on Box Net, only downloads and opens in Quicktime but not Real or Windows media players.)
VLC it plays most everything 
Does anybody have tips or advice on how to get better at this? I can get a single steady tone with a bit of work but I’ve never been able to change the pitch. I would love to ad this “instrument” to my repertoire.
First, make the cavity enclosed by your hands as large in volume as possible to get the lowest possible staring point. Once you can reliably get a decent tone with the closed chamber, you can raise pitch by gradually opening the fingers of the hand that is wrapped around the back (as opposed to over the top) - with practice, you can ham out a tune opening and closing the “flap” they form. I suppose serious amounts of practice would allow quite accurate tune-playing, at least as good as with a swannee whistle. When I’m in practice at it, I can get about an octave range.
The other way to raise pitch is to reduce the size of the chamber by squeezing your hands together. I can get a full octave this way, too. But it’s probably more difficult to control than the fingers technique, which I never mastered*.
- The context of mastery being, as I recall in my case, making rude cooing noises to annoy my 4th grade teacher. Whatever level of technique I developed was more than adequate to that task.
I always thought of it as a dove coo. Only about half of my family can coo with their hands, and that’s only because we practiced it constantly. I’ve only managed to play Mary had a little lamb, but that’s it. I usually use it to make dove coos and owl hoots. I’ve scared people before while camping and making a hoot right next to them. They jump every time. 