La Gomera’s Silbo is so extensively covered by so many great researchers that I struggled greatly to condense all the writings into such a short essay. I found many videos, papers and articles about Silbo also pointing to other whistling languages that I found very interesting in comparison. I’ll link to some of the videos…

Much of the phonetic and phonological research that developed our understanding of the languages sonic qualities owe gratitude to André Classe, Ramón Trujillo and more contemporarily Annie Rialland who, deducted past publications, and conducted herself, spectrographic studies into syllabic translations of Castilian Spanish to Silbo. Her paper Phonological and phonetic aspects of whistled languages* is…

There is an obvious difference between the version of Silbo taught in classrooms and that what is used by some of the elder inhabitants. An example of this generational gap is presented through a quote from Ciro Mesa Niebla, a farmer of the island in his late 40s, expressing his difficulties… “”I’m a mountain guy…

Julien Meyer has done extensive work in covering the anthropology of whistling languages as well as other non-spoken languages. In his academic paper mentioned in the title, I found an account where he delves into the linguistic nature of Silbo documenting it’s phonetic structure in order to compare it with other whistling languages he has researched.…

The origins of the language are quite esoteric but many of the local people agree Silbo arrived on the island through the Guanches as they were the original settlers on the island pre-Hispanic colonisation. These people are considered descendants to the “Berber tribes that still populate the North African continent.”   Upon reduced listening, the language…

André Classe writes a much earlier ethnography of La Gomera’s “Silbo” in 1957 where some of the terms used for descriptions are quite dated. The paper authoritatively sates the historical proto whistling languages that existed before colonisation were employed by the indigenous peoples of the island… “the Guanches, had developed a whistled form of language…

Having read an article from the BBC published July 2021, I was stunned at a wealth of knowledge covered so well on the topic of “Silbo” (the whistling language of La Gomera) and how it was condensed into a nice brief read… You can read it for your own interest here It’s quite amazing that…

Having remembered about an aspect of the Canaries culture relating to sound about a whistling language from the island of La Gomera, I think an ethnography on this subject will be quite interesting and informative for my own understanding about the use of non-verbal sonic communication. It is probably a subject quite well covered, but…

I think it would be interesting to do an essay about an ethnography of the indigenous people of either the Philippines or the Canaries and their relationship with sound. Before the introduction of western culture, how did these people use and create sound in their everyday lives? Was there ceremonial use for sound and how…

This prelude into the theory of musicking was quite thought provoking and quite radical that for the first time in a long time I felt value in many more aspects of music that I had before. I felt more appreciation for all the aspects of “musicking” as he states…  [“To music is to take part,…