Terry (over at w 0 R m h 0 L 3) did a brilliant write up recently on whistling, non-material hobbies and just pure creative pleasure. After reading through the piece and checking out the videos he linked, I couldn't help but be reminded of whistling's Irish-Gaelic relative, Lilting.
Besides it being uplifting, charming, and just dang fun to listen to, Lilting does have a deep cultural context for those from Ireland and of Irish-decent. To heavily truncate things for the sake of this entry, Lilting came about not only due to practical reasons (like not everyone can afford a flute or harp), but also due to colonial factors too. For 200 years the Irish were colonized, persecuted, and suppressed by the English. This time was known as The Penal Laws.
The Brits were doing everything in their power to stamp out Irish culture, and this included its music. So how does one pass along their traditional songs if they can't get their hands on instruments to play, or it is too dangerous to explicitly play such songs aloud? Lilting was a solution.
I don't have much to offer beyond this point. If I were to go deeper, I'd want to kick into academic gear and start looking up proper sources and the like. Right now, I don't got the time for such silliness.
I'll leave things with this. What someone may take for silliness within creativity can have a deep artfulness and cultural importance to it. If you find pleasure and enjoyment in how your express your creative spirit, good. That is the end-all-be-all of it. Forget the people who project their own self-consciousness, anxiety and begrudging onto you. Their on their own journey and sadly, it doesn't have any lilting to accompany it. Sláinte.
Addendum:
Ok, just one halfway relevant academic source.
This and Terry's whistling post were such exciting surprises. I had no idea of the origins of lilting. As a man who grew up in the Boston area, I have comically large amounts of pride regarding Irish heritage and this just puts me to another, somehow more absurd level.
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