Even my professors who compose primarily electronic music agree that a resurgence in instrumental music is on its way. As interest increasingly returns to traditional instruments, performers and composers alike have begun hunting for new methods of sound production. These “extended techniques” are of varying use, some being so esoteric and difficult to execute that I usually just write them off as impractical. The ones I tend to use more frequently are those that require minimal preparation (even if they require a bit of practice) and produce not noise but musical sounds with definite, controllable pitch.

As a flautist, I have done my best to explore all the literature on extended techniques for flute that I can find. Robert Dick’s book The Other Flute has become the Bible of extended flute techniques, while Mats Möller’s work delves into an even wilder range of sounds. One technique that produces an absolutely beautiful sound but seems difficult to explain, judging from all the attempts I’ve come across that fall short of success, is the whisper tone (also called a whistle tone or flageolet* tone). Whisper tones are the flute’s equivalent of harmonics on string instruments in that they split a normal note, with all those overtones you work so hard to put into your tone, into its constituent frequencies and isolating only one. A number of “how-to” articles exist in print and online, but as an amateur flautist, I’ve had to piece it all together and work many things out for myself. I figured I’d save you the trouble.

Embouchre

As a word of warning: whisper tones require you to learn and develop and entirely new embouchre. I’m used to switching embouchres on the fly as a reedman, but if you’re one of those dedicated flautists who may even shy away from playing piccolo because of the danger it may pose to your flute embouchre, I would advise you against pursuing whisper tones. That said, though, you’d be missing out on an exciting new way of producing absolutely beautiful music on your instrument. I highly recommend that any flautist at any level try to play whisper tones.

The first things you’ll hear when you ask how to play whisper tones is that you need a loose embouchre and low air pressure. Many of the guides I’ve read describe it as an “uncontrolled” embouchre (and I’m deliberately leaving out citations here so as not to make accusations), but in truth, it’s exactly the opposite: in many ways, it requires a more controlled embouchre. The air stream must remain very strictly directed even though your lips are much more relaxed. Try barely closing your lips around the very tip of your pinky finger, and I’ve found that that’s just about the perfect embouchre size and tightness. As for air pressure, you’ll have to back off to about what will produce the softest possible sound in the first octave (using normal technique). The sound production method is compeltely different. When playing normally, you’re creating a vibrating column of air inside the flute. When playing whisper tones, you’re essentially using the flute as a whistle.**

Harmonic Fingerings

Mats Möller’s description of whisper tones provided a very key piece of information: whisper tones in the third octave and higher, from second leger line D, are the easiest to produce and sustain.² (Because you’re already using harmonic fingerings, those specific harmonics speak even easier.) In addition, the whisper tones that speak most clearly and quickly with those fingerings are at pitch, so it’s easy to check that you’ve got the right embouchre and air support by playing the same note normally.

Getting Started

To begin, pick a note mid-octave. When I practice whisper tones, I usually start at high G or A and work my way either up or down chromatically. For the sake of example, let’s say you start with G. Play a first-octave G, as you normally would, as softly as possible. Now, without changing anything except the fingering, slur up two octaves to high G. You should hear a very faint whistling noise, something like steam coming out of a boiling kettle (but obviously much, much quieter). Now, try to solidify that note. Usually, a tiny bit of tightening the embouchre will make the whisper tone ring out clearly. Rolling your flute outward slightly (“lipping the note up,” as my old flute teacher used to say) and slightly increasing your air pressure (to compensate for the loose embouchre) may also help.

Once you’ve found where to hold the flute and about how you should be playing, it’s time to hone in on controlling that sound. You may have noticed when playing around with your air support and angle that it’s really easy to “flip” between pitches, similar to overblowing and jumping octaves when playing normally. Play around with that same single fingering until you find what’s definitely the loudest and clearest of the pitches you can produce. It should be the same as note that you’re fingering, so play it and double-check. If not, see if you can find that pitch and work your embouchre, angle, and air until it’s the clearest of them.

Adjustments

Next, try stepping up or down chromatically. You may have to try the above steps with each note because you have to compensate so differently from how you normally would using your embouchre, air, and angle. Generally speaking, the adjustments are much more exaggerated. Work through the entire third octave and up through the fourth octave. I can produce the F# at the extreme limit of the flute’s upper range as a whisper tone with almost no difficulty. It’s when you try stepping into the lower half of the third octave and down below that that you really have to start working your jaw and lips. From about third leger line Eb, you have to drop your jaw A LOT and aim deeper into the mouthpiece to maintain the sound. You may also have to decrease your air supply as you go lower, as you did when you were first learning to play in the first octave. Eventually, you’ll be able to keep an even stream of air as you play lower. Whisper tones even down into the first octave are possible with much practice, but the higher whisper tones above those low notes remain the easiest and clearest.

Volume

Volume is the next step. Many believe that you can play whisper tones as loudly as normal tones with enough practice. Because of the nature of the sound, I personally doubt that you could ever make a whisper tone sound like a ff high C, but I do agree that with much practice, you can make your whisper tones project well across any concert hall. As you increase your air support, your air stream will get more and more chaotic (because of your loose embouchre), so you’ll have to adjust your embouchre slightly as you get louder to keep the air focused in the right place.

Developing volume is arguably the hardest part of learning to play whistle tones. You can certainly stop here, but there’s one more “bonus” step that I feel is a valuable one. Those unstable tones, other than the primary pitch, that sound with a given fingering are the other harmonics above that note. Try to play specific harmonics on a given fingering. When you have enough control, those unstable tones will become (almost) as stable as the primary pitch. A harmonic glissando is even possible by “flipping” through the harmonics. The primary pitch is undoubtedly the easiest to make speak, but it’s good to be able to move to other harmonics from that primary pitch.

Experiment

A good deal of learning to play whispertones is experimentation. My goal was at least to provide a guide for experimentation with a step-by-step approach and ideas about what worked for me. As with any technique, the key is practice, practice, practice. This extended technique is becoming more and more popular but remains relatively rarely performed because of the work and time it takes to develop your whisper tone chops. Once you are able to play these beautiful sounds on your flute, I strongly encourage you to look into the modern flute repertoire to begin playing some of the pieces that use whisper tones as well as other extended techniques.

* The flageolet is an archaic, end-blown pipe instrument that eventually replaced the recorder.¹ As such, one can infer that it produced a similarly near-pure sine tone, a sound similar also to that produced by the eponymous flute technique (since whisper tones are essentially pure sine tones).

** Whistles create tones using a turbulent air stream. The turbulence creates white noise (think blowing into a microphone), which is then filtered by a resonating chamber with a specific resonant frequency.

¹ “flageolet.” Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary. MICRA, Inc. 01 Mar. 2009. <Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/flageolet>.
² Möller, Mats. “New technique of tone development.” New sounds for flute. 01 Mar. 2009. <http://www.sfz.se/flutetech/05.htm#wt>.