Hand flute

The hand flute, or handflute, is a musical instrument made out of the player's hands. It is also called a hand ocarina or hand whistle. To produce sound, the player creates a chamber of air with their hands, into which they blow air via an opening at the thumbs. There are two common techniques involving the shape of the hand chamber: the "cupped hand" technique and the "interlock" technique.¹

The pitch depends on how the hands are held. If the space between the hands is made smaller or the opening made larger, the pitch becomes higher: the principles are the same with an ocarina or Helmholtz resonator; see vessel flute for details of the acoustics. The best hand flute players have a range of up to 2.5 octaves.²

An early recording of hand-whistling originates from a 1954 short communication.³ Bearing similarity to "a lover’s flute tradition"³, it was described how Kickapoo from Mexico "cupp[ed] the[ir] hands, [a]ir was blown into the cavity between the knuckles of the thumbs [that were] placed against the lips vertically".³