Embouchure of human whistling using physical models of vocal tract-which of the five Japanese vowels creates the mouth shape that produces the loudest whistling sound?

Abstract

Whistling competitions have been held regularly in Japan in recent years, and some prize-winning whistlers have established music classrooms to teach musical whistling. However, in our survey, one-third of people could not whistle. Our work studied the principles of sound production in human whistling, using physical models of the human vocal tract. The models were obtained from an X-ray computed tomography (CT) image of the vocal tract during whistling. However, it is hard to explain to the person who cannot whistle how to whistle. To overcome this problem, we showed the shape of the mouth when the whistling sound was the loudest. To this end, we used a physical model of the human vocal tract based on its X-ray image when the five Japanese vowels were being uttered. We demonstrated that a whistling sound was generated during the utterance of all five vowels, and that the best mouth shape was obtained in uttering/e/. ©.