Primitive music 3: Ice age flute that plays two notes at once 🎵
Channel: Make It Primitive
Date: 2020-08-20

Ever since I visited the "Urmu" museum in Blaubeuren, I have been slightly obsessed with the "Hohler Fels" flute. This 35.000 years old instrument is one of the oldest preserved flutes in the world. The strange and simple design of what is thought to be its mouthpiece challenged me to find out how it might have worked, so I built myself one from elderberry wood.

Experimental archaeologists like Wulf Hein have crafted replicas of this instrument, and he got a decently clear sound from it:

→ https://youtu.be/yUCBBDV2Tzk?t=28

I, however, failed to tease anything out of my prototypes but some sort of "colorized noise". For months, one of them lay on my desk, silently mocking me for my inability to figure it out. Then one day, while re-watching Wulfs video, it finally dawned on me: He isn't blowing the flute like you would with a normal flute - he is whistling! Of course he isn't pretending to play the flute while actually whistling. When held at in the right position, the flutes' mouthpiece and the player's lips form an opening that is suitable for whistling.

Still, why would you need a flute when you have to whistle into it? Once I tried it, this made more sense: When the airflow hits the edge at the right angle, the whistling is amplified and sharpened. And what's more: You can whistle a different note than you're playing, effectively playing two tunes on one flute (albeit one of them rather airy). But even when the whistling and the flute are playing the same note (in the same octave as well as higher or lower), the resonance creates a sound that differs significantly from normal whistling. Looking at the spectrogram, it is clear that the overtones are much more pronounced.

But couldn't you do this with any tube-shaped object? Yes, but the shape of the mouthpiece does seem to make a difference. For comparison I tried whistling over the other end, which is cut off straight. The most striking difference to me was when whistling one octave lower than the flute's note (which is the most comfortable whistling range). Not only was the peak of the whistled frequency in the spectrogram quieter (-29 db  instead of -24 db), but the airy sound of the flute was much less audible. The latter could be a clue that this type of flute was indeed designed for playing biphonic music.

So did our ancestors play these flutes by whistling? There's no way to know. I have seen recordings of experienced flutists getting cleaner sounds from such flutes without whistling, I just don't know how they do it. If I ever find out, there will definitely be a followup to this video. But still: If there are several ways to play an instrument, I'm pretty sure their creators will have known and used them. There must have been virtuosos as well as casual players back then, and the specimen we found certainly wasn't the only one ever made. So for now, I'm happy with this preliminary result.

• Are you a flutist and you know more about how to play such a flute? 
• Do you know anything else about this topic that I missed? 
• Then please let me know in the comments!


About my flutes:

The instrument I build and play in the video is the short one from the opening shot. It is tuned to a pentatonic scale, roughly F - G# - A# - C - D# - F - G#. The two longer ones have C as a base note, one with a pentatonic scale as well, the other one is diatonic. I found the F version to be in the sweet spot for my abilities, as this seems to be about the range that is the easiest to whistle without losing the flute's sound at the low notes or running out of air after a couple of high notes.

As the disclaimer at the beginning of the video states, these are not attempts at creating a replica of the Hohler Fels flute. The original is made out of a vulture radius bone and thus much thinner and denser than I could easily reproduce from an elderberry branch. I will probably try to get closer to the original one day, but for now, I contented myself with tuning my flutes according to what sounds nice to my ears. Our ancestors might have had very different musical preferences. 


Links and references:

→ "Interpreting Three Upper Palaeolithic Wind Instrumentsfrom Germany and One from France as Flutes. (Re)construction, Playing Techniques and Sonic Results" by Susanne C. Münzel, Nicholas J. Conard, Wulf Hein, Frances Gill, Anna Friederike Potengowski: https://www.academia.edu/37132293
→ 3D model of the Hohle Fels Flute: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/ice-age-art-flute-54055b71bd4c45ba9bdd725a8f9127f0
→ The museum "Urmu" in Blaubeuren, where the original is on display: https://www.urmu.de/
→ Wulf Hein's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/ulfr23


In case you're curious about the tunes in this video, let me leave you with these two links:

→ "Old melody" (also known als "Daglarym / My Mountains") - Sainkho Namtchylak: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXI0HcC1VRk
→ "Khulguud" - Hosoo & Transmongolia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A36dtdUY9e0


#primitivemusic