Tired of language? Do words mean nothing? Try something new. Whistle to U.W.M. (The Universal Whistling Machine), and it will counter with its own composition, based on a time-frequency analysis of your original.

Whistling is a communication primitive in most human languages. Whistling is a kind of time travel to a less articulated state. Inhabitants of Gomera, one of the Canary Islands, use a whistling language, el Silbo Gomera, to communicate from hilltop to hilltop. Their powerful whistles travel farther than the spoken word. We share whistling and song with many animals. Mammals and birds carry the means for whistling in them. Just as we carry physical remnants of our bodily evolution in us, we carry the capacity for whistling in us.

U.W.M is an investigation into the vexing problem of human-machine interface design. Whistling is much closer to the phoneme-less signal primitives compatible with digital machinery than the messy domain of spoken language. As opposed to pushing machines into engaging humans in spoken language, U.W.M. suggests we meet on a middle ground.


* Here are two short Quicktime clips of U.W.M in action * : Carolyn a n d Tom


Here are samples from our library of whistles. Each example is given as the original noisy whistle (Ex_n), U.W.M.'s synthetic copy (Ex_n_syn) and a compositionally altered variation (Ex_n_transform).

Male, 40, SwissGerman				Ex_1,			Ex_1_syn,			Ex_1_transform
Male, 30, Turkish				Ex_2,			Ex_2_syn,			Ex_2_transform
Female, 20, Korean				Ex_3,			Ex_3_syn,			Ex_3_transform
Male, 35, English				Ex_4,			Ex_4_syn,			Ex_4_transform
Robin (Bird, n.a.)				Ex_5,			Ex_5_syn,			Ex_5_transform

Click here for the COSIGN2004 paper that describes U.W.M. and the Language Remainder.