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A B S TR A C TThe history of recorded natural sound is often posited as beginning with the capa bility for humans to record actual animals in their environment, but in fact this was a departure from the widespread and quite popular practices that preceded such technological developments. Because sound recording technologies were confined to studio spaces and were generally immobile, popular performers adopted a variety of imitative techniques to transport listeners into scenes and settings that the tech nology itself could not access. The most popular of these imitative techniques was performance whistling. This essay traces historical developments in the cultural at titudes surrounding whistling through its musical and nonmusical associations with a variety of "others," including animals, African Americans, homosexuals, and the work ing poor. It also traces how white professional performers drew on American environ mental attitudes and the rhetoric of "nature" and "the natural" as a way to distance themselves from these stereotypes and establish themselves as legitimate artists and educators. These whistling practices present a new way to hear the history of recording technologies, identity politics, and the American environmental movement. O FTEN CELEBRATED AS THE MOST DEMOCRATIC MUSICAL FORM, WHISTLING TODAY IS generally perceived as an innocuous, if slightly annoying, background task: you whistle while you work. But at the height of its popularity between approximately 1890 and 1940, whistling did a significant amount of cultural work, as the act itself and the people who performed it were at the center of dramatic changes in how nature sounds were recorded, pre sented, and consumed in the United States.1 Because sound recording technologies were confined to studio spaces and generally immobile through the late 1920s, popular performers adopted a variety of imitative techniques to transport listeners into scenes and settings that the technol ogy itself could not access-places such as farms, forests, fields, zoos, and the Sewanee River.2 Among these imitative practices, whistling proved to be both remarkably popular and enduring.At the turn of the century, the act of whistling was a complex mimetic practice that existed not only at the intersection of music and sound effects but also at the intersection of human and "other." As a pseudoscience, whistling was used by bird imitators to represent encounters with the natural world, but as a mode of individual expression, whistling was more often associ ated with African Americans, the unintelligent, homosexuals, and the working poor. In order to overcome these stereotypes, professional performance whistlers-who were primarily whitefocused specifically on bird imitation techniques and mobilized the rhetoric of "nature" and "the natural" in order to legitimize their art. Female whistlers connected their performances to D O I: 1 0 .7 5 6 0 /V L T 7 4 0 2 4 THE VELVET LIGHT TRAP N U M B E R 74 FALL 2014 2014 by th e U niv e rs ity o f Texas Press
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