Whistling did a significant amount of cultural work, as the act itself and the people who performed it were at the center of dramatic changes in how nature sounds were recorded, presented, and consumed in America. Because sound recording technologies were confined to studio spaces and generally immobile through the late 1920s, popular performers adopted a variety of imitative techniques to transport listeners into scenes and settings that the technology itself could not access--places such as farms, forests, fields, zoos,  . Among these imitative practices, whistling proved to be both remarkably popular and enduring.