Priscila Lena Farias / Anna Calvera Marcos da Costa ... - Blucher

Here we don’t speak, here we whistle: designing a language spport system for the Silbo Gomero
sounds that have a complex temporal development; this phenomena
is visible when performing the Silbo out in the fields where
various sounds may be heard simultaneously. The ‘mnemo-perceptive
effects’ concern the way listeners ‘memorize sounds, a
feature that also influences the ways in which a listener searches
for sounds in the environment and the sounds that are culturally
valorized over others’ (Ibid.: 17). And the ‘psychomotor effects’
that concern ‘the actions or schemes developed by listeners
when interacting with particular sounds’ (Ibid.: 17). The phenomenon
qualifies the ways in which the receiver of a whistled
message directs the body towards the source of the whistled
utterance. This example is associated with the ‘attraction effect’,
where “an emerging sound phenomenon attracts and polarizes
attention” (Ibid.: 27).
At this stage of design development, it was important to take into
account the fact that these ‘effects’ are central to the ecological
development of the whistler’s body of knowledge as presented
above. In this stage it was also pertinent to understand these ‘effects’
as entangled phenomena that provide distinct schemes of
interaction and therefore cannot be reenacted in isolation. This
feature reemphasized the potential afforded by computational
mediums, one that would shift some of the visually informed didactic
materials as suggested in first didactic publication regarding
the Silbo Gomero (Brito et al. 2005) to a medium with vaster
interactive and sonic potentials.
5. Some Final Remarks
It is important to finalize this contribution by emphasizing that
the mobilized ecological direction does not necessarily offer
a ‘remedy’ in the safeguard and effective teaching of the Silbo
Gomero in the space of the classroom. My point has rather been
a shift in perspective when designing didactic materials for this
unique form of language, one that attempts to move beyond its
surrogacy to speech. In this sense, this body of research has attempted
to mobilize a cultural reading of the Silbo Gomero while
offering an ecological framework that is both rooted in local forms
of embodied ‘audile’ knowledge while mingling with contemporary
technological platforms and the challenges they carry. Finally
instigating future directions that traverse the community. And
while an older generation of whistlers might see in this whistled
form of language the transmission of a culture of the past, I hope
that the work developed so far might actually enhance the fact
that they contribute towards the preparation of an ‘audile’ culture
for the future.
Acknowledgment
The work here presented was made possible through the continuous
support of numerous people such as: Isidro Ortiz Mendonza,
Lino Rodriguez, the children of CEIP El Retamal, Esther Padilla, Janet
Placencia Moreno, Marisa Blanco Perés, Pilar Mesa Fuentes,
Ana Luz, Montse Cano, doctoral supervisors Dr. Matthew Fuller, Dr.
Olga Goriunova, Dr. Luciana Parisi, and musician Florian Hecker.
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