A few years ago I decided to teach myself to be able to do that loud wolf-whistle that I’ve seen others do, when they put a two fingers into their mouth and the resulting whistle can crack a wine-glass. Well, I looked on Youtube (yes, in this data-rich age, there are people showing you how to learn to whistle!) and did it over a few months and can now do a whistle that hurts my own ears. For no reason other than it was fun to learn to do… but there was another reason:

I knew from ‘normal’ whistling, that when we pucker up and blow, like Bogart said to Bacall in The Maltese Falcon (one of my favourites, B&W and old but classic!), that as soon as we blow too hard, the whistle doesn’t work. Hence a parallel with trumpet playing. So my learning to wolf-whistle with my fingers in my mouth reinforced that there is a certain sensation of the optimum amount of air flowing over the lip aperture, with too little meaning no sound, whilst too much means the lips can’t vibrate since you’re holding them do stiffly to prevent them blowing outwards. It was fun to experience that directly, away from the trumpet, to remind me not to overblow.