I was listening to a song and I liked it a lot, and then half an hour later I found myself whistling the same song almost perfectly and on my first try, and that got me thinking, how do we have this ability? (Given that you know how to whistle, obviously) Or even just humming it?
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It’s called audiating, where you can actually hear the music in your mind before you ever make a sound. When you go to hum or whistle, your brain already knows what’s correct because you’ve practiced it subconsciously, meaning you can easily adjust for mistakes as you go.
Musicians practice this constantly, as it’s an essential part of reading sheet music.
First not everyone can hold a tune. The practice would happen when you learned to whistle and modulate that tune. I use to know some talented musicians and they could mostly play by ear.
Your brain knows how the song is supposed to go, and it also already knows the mouth shapes it needs to make to produce any given note because you’ve already had plenty of practice whistling. It’s like playing the piano or something. Practice enough and you just know how to play it, so you can sight-read (play a piece of music based solely on the music infront of you without any practice) reasonably well.
You just master whistling. You can do that with any instrument you master.
You memorized the song. Your brain knows intuitively how to make each noise you have in memory, so you don’t need practice, you can just play the music.
This actually reminds me how my stepdad whistels all the time but cannot make it a tune. Like he’ll be standing in the fridge shirtless rubbing his belly and whisteling like an infinite gamecube startup jingle.
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