Kulning or herding calls is a domestic Scandinavian music form predominantly performed by Norwegian and Swedish people often used to call livestock (cows, goats, etc.) down from high mountain pastures where they have been grazing during the day. It is possible that the sound also serves to scare away predators (wolves, bears, etc.), but this is not the main purpose of the call.
In Norway it is called laling/llalning,/lålning, kauking/kaukning, or lokk/kulokk[1], and in the provinces of Dalarna and Hälsingland in Sweden and in the former Norwegian provinces of Jämtland and Härjedalen as lokk/kulokk, or kyrlokk.
The song form is often used by women, as they were the ones tending the herds and flocks in the high mountain pastures, but there are recordings of these calls sung by men.
The song has a high-pitched vocal technique, i.e. a loud call using head tones, so that it can be heard or be used to communicate over long distances. It has a fascinating and haunting tone, often conveying a feeling of sadness, in large part because the kulokks often include typical half-tones and quarter-tones (also known as "blue tones") found in the music of the region. Linguist and phonetician Robert Eklund, speech therapist Anita McAllister and kulning singer and speech therapist Fanny Pehrson studied the difference between kulning voice production and head voice (sometimes also somewhat erroneously[citation needed] referred to as falsetto voice) production in both indoors (normal and anechoic rooms) and in an ecologically valid outdoor setting near Dalarna, Sweden. The song analyzed was the same in all cases, and was performed by the same kulning singer (Pehrson). Comparing kulning to head voice, they found that partials were visible in far higher registers in kulning than in head voice (easily observed up to 16 kHz) and that they were also less affected by an increased distance from the source than head voice, with more or less unaffected partial patterns when comparing a distance of 11 meters from the source, compared to 1 meter from the source. In the outdoor setting, they also found that head voice production exhibited a 25.2 dB decrease at 11 meters from the source, compared to 1 meter from the source, while the corresponding amplitude decrease in kulning was only 9.4 dB, which is a clear indication that kulning is well-suited to carry over long distances in an outdoor setting. Or, as the authors summarize the findings:
"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".[2]
When a call is made in a valley, it rings and echoes against the mountains. The animals, a number of whom wear bells tuned so that the livestock's location can be heard, begin to respond to the call, answering back and the sound of the bells indicates that they are moving down the mountain towards their home farm. The kulokks can belong to an individual, but are sometimes family-based and are handed down so that a family's cows know they are being called and thus respond. A number of calls contain names of individual (sometimes the "lead") animals, as herds are not very large.
A study done by Finnish and Swedish universities[3] showed that kulning, as compared to falsetto, exhibits a better contact of the vocal folds and a longer glottal closure in the phonation cycle. Using nasofiberendoscopy also showed medial and anteroposterior narrowing of the laryngeal inlet and approximation of the false vocal folds in kulning.
In comparison with other song traditions used in northern Scandinavia, e.g. joik, there is no evidence that kulning has been used in religious rituals or for other purposes. It has been used on farms in stock-raising since medieval times. The tradition is still alive today, although waning. Kulning is, however, similar to yodeling, a singing style also developed for long-distance sound propagation.
In France, briolage is a set of "techniques of calls and exhortations to the ploughing animals in most cases, intended to guide them".[4]
Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg based a few of his classical music compositions for piano and for orchestra on kulokker that he had heard. An early Norwegian opera includes a soprano aria that is half aria and half kulning.
Kulning features in the music of some Scandinavian folk groups, for example Heilung, Gjallarhorn and Frifot (featuring singer Lena Willemark).
The song "Ulveham" by Norwegian band Gåte, which they're competing with at Norway's Eurovision Song Contest 2024 national selection, Melodi Grand Prix 2024, includes a kulning vocalisation on the chorus.
There are also other examples of kulning to be found in other forms of modern media: