Authors: Ben Ruhe
Date Submitted: February 28, 2006
Article Type: Journal

One of the most charming of the kite-related World Wide Web sites is Uli Wahl’s Kite Musical Instruments pages, out of Weinheim, Germany. Wahl has been interested in aeolian—-wind-generated—-sounds for some 30 years now and his site is expansive to say the least. It’s in both German and English. Aeolus was the Greek mythological god of wind.

As he explains, there are two different types of sound-producing devices for kites—-flutes and harps. Both devices are meant to be sent aloft either on, or in, the kite itself, or fixed to the flying line. In the case of the harp, the speeding wind makes a string vibrate. In the case of the whistle, wind passing through a specially formed hole in a gourd or section of bamboo causes sound. In both cases, vortices produced by the flow of air produce the eerie music—-both intense and plaintive.

Aeolian instruments are well over a thousand years old and known around the world, but Asians are viewed as the past masters of capturing the wind in order to produce an aerial melody. Musical kites with their celestial tones provide pleasant entertainment, serve rice farmers as audible wind meters signaling wind shifts, and were formerly used for meteorological divination; in Cambodia for example, they were flown to predict whether the rice-growing season ahead would be dry or wet. They are so common in Indonesia and Malaysia that any kite big enough to hold a hummer is automatically equipped with one.

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