Off The Record
Kulning – A Beautiful Ancient High Pitch Melody Used As A Herding Call
In the caption Jonna Jinton wrote:
“A beautiful, bright night in June I was out to do some “kulning”, the ancient high pitch singing, that a long time ago were used as a herding call for the cows and goats, since the sound travel through far distances. I had never before tried it on real cows. I thought that maybe something deep inside them still would remember the sounds from ancient times when the women called them home. It did work.”
As soon as I stumbled upon Jonna Jinton’s video, I was blown away to see that the cows respond to this amazing calling, which is also know as kulning.
It’s not just a regular calling.
Kulning or herding calls is a domestic Scandinavian music form, often used to call livestock (goats, cows, etc.) down from high mountain pastures where they have been grazing during the day. It is possible that the sound is also used to scare away predators (wolves, bears, etc.), but this is not the main purpose of the music form.
According to research by Swedish academics with a kulning singer, the high tones and the specific way of singing is made for carrying the message over long distances: “it was shown that kulning fell off less with distance from an intensity point of view, and also that partials in kulning — but not in head voice — remained more or less unperturbed 11 meters from the singer, as compared to 1 meter from the singer. Both results help explain why kulning as a singing mode was developed for calling cattle that might be at considerable distance from the singer.”
The sound needs to be loud and strong because it needs to be transferred far to serve it’s purpose.
After all, people had to invent natural things (like the sound bellow) to sustain life and make it easier. Now, modern communication technology took over.
Listen to this amazing sound by Jonna Jinton bellow:
Kulning – Ancient Swedish herding call
A beautiful, bright night in june I was out to do some "kulning", the ancient high pitch singing, that a long time ago were used as a herding call for the cows and goats, since the sound travel through far distances. I had never before tried it on real cows. I thought that maybe something deep inside them still would remember the sounds from ancient times when the women called them home. It did work.
Posted by Jonna Jinton on Friday, July 1, 2016
