Hitting the right notes

University of Saskatchewan (USask) graduate Mike Sheinin (BASc’13, MSc’15) is a busy person who wears many hats as a computer scientist, senior applications engineering manager, and rugby player and coach.

His resume also includes another key—but perhaps somewhat unexpected—role: international competitive whistler. 

“I am a professional whistler, and I just like to show the world just how awesome whistling can be—and hopefully inspire others to become their own whistle masters," Sheinin explained in a video on his YouTube channel, Whistle Master, before launching into a whistle cover of the song Holy by Justin Bieber, featuring Chance the Rapper. 

In a recent interview with the Green&White, Sheinin talked about his passion for computers, rugby, and whistling, and about co-founding the International Whistlers Guild (IWG), which was created in 2020 by young ambitious whistlers with the goal of reaching people around the world and shining a light on their talents.

“The whistling community is very vast, and there’s a lot of people from Europe and Asia,” Sheinin said. “There’s a big cohort in Japan, there’s some from China, and there’s a big whistling community in India.” 

While Sheinin has been whistling all his life, he is a relative newcomer to the professional whistling scene. He first took part in the Masters of Musical Whistling (MMW) competition in Hollywood, Calif., in 2017—and he was immediately hooked. MMW, which is hosted by producer and artistic director Carole Anne Kaufman, a Southern California native known as the “Whistling Diva,” recognizes and promotes musical whistling as fine art—and it’s a place where Sheinin shines. 

Since 2017, Sheinin has always made it to the top tier of the competition. In 2023, he won the Breakout Award for Excellence in Artistry, and in 2025 he was honoured with the Smoothest Tone award.

Outside of the MMW competition, in 2018 Sheinin also competed in the World Whistlers Convention (WWC) in Japan.  

“There’s been some other ones, but that’s kind of the main whistling circuit,” he said of the American and Japanese competitions.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, which started in 2020, international whistling competitions were paused—but Sheinin wanted to keep on making music. As a result, he collaborated with several fellow whistlers in the U.S. and Japan to start the International Whistlers Guild (IWG), which hosts online competitions. One of the purposes of the IWG’s online competitions is to open competitive whistling to more people around the world, since not everyone can afford to travel to Hollywood or to Japan, Sheinin said.

“Our online competitions are very cheap and very accessible,” he said. “If people can’t pay the fee, we'll figure it out anyway. We just want as many people as possible to show the world what they can do and enjoy and have fun together and be a part of the community.”

Although in-person whistling competitions have resumed since the pandemic ended, the IWG still hosts an online whistling competition every year to engage the international& whistling community as much as possible.

“The whistling community is a very interesting competition community. Everyone wants everyone to succeed and everyone’s cheering on everyone,” Sheinin said.

International whistling competitions “are very fun,” and there’s a “core group” of competitors that tend to take part, Sheinin said. He is a part of that core group and, as a result, he was included in Whistle, a recent documentary about the Hollywood competition directed by Christopher Nelius. The documentary, from the Academy Award-nominated team behind Porcelain War and the Grammy Award-winning Quincy, has since been a part of film festivals around the globe. For example, Whistle was an official selection of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and DOC NYC in 2025, and DOCVILLE and the Palm Springs International Film Festival in 2026, among numerous other festivals.

Sheinin’s whistling skills are shown in the film, and he had the opportunity to attend TIFF and DOC NYC as a result.

“I got to go to Toronto and do the red carpet of TIFF. It was really cool, and then they got me and the other whistlers to go up on stage after the movie and whistle in front of everyone,” he said. “The New York one was very similar and very cool.” 

While some whistlers come to whistling competitions from a musical background, Sheinin notes that he grew up with no formal musical training. Rather, he started naturally whistling as a child, and he never stopped.

“My parents just say I figured it out one day, and I’ve done it ever since,” he said. “I just whistled to music by myself, in my house, maybe with my family hearing—but it wasn’t a public thing, and it wasn’t a thing that I showed off.” 

Sheinin never took part in whistling competitions while in high school or in university—though he’d often whistle as he studied as a student in USask’s College of Arts and Science. That’s where he discovered another passion: computer science. Sheinin, who started studying at USask in 2007, originally chose chemistry as his major but later changed it to computer science after enrolling in a course on video games.

“I don’t know why I hadn’t tried it out before, because I like video games. And it just clicked and everything was great after that,” he said.

After taking some computer science classes, Sheinin talked to one of his professors, Dr. Carl Gutwin (BSc’88, MSc’91, PhD), about his interest in the subject matter, and Gutwin told him about the development of the interactive systems design program, which combines courses in art and art history, psychology, and computer science. Sheinin later graduated from USask with a Bachelor of Arts and Science (BASc) degree in interactive systems design in 2013.

After earning his undergraduate degree, Sheinin enrolled as a graduate student at USask in the computer science program, with Gutwin serving as his supervisor for his master’s degree. Sheinin’s focus was again on video games, and he was involved with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCI Lab) in the Department of Computer Science.

“The HCI Lab here does a lot of unique things on how humans interact with computers and how we can have different interfaces to things,” Sheinin said.

Prior to focusing on whistling competitions, Sheinin was focused on video games. In fact, one of the games he worked on as a graduate student later won a game competition in Seoul, Korea, in 2015 during the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY).

“We won the award for best game at that conference—that was pretty cool,” said Sheinin. “It was a very interesting master’s.”

Sheinin graduated from USask again in 2015, this time with his Master of Science degree. His training in computer science has since proven to be invaluable in his employment endeavours, including in his current role as a senior applications engineering manager for Solido products at the tech company Siemens EDA Saskatoon, a division of Siemens Digital Industries Software. Sheinin now recommends USask’s computer science courses to others.

“I think it’s an amazing program here,” he said. “What you get here is a really strong background for any tech job in the whole world, I would say.”

As a USask student, Sheinin was also involved with Saskatoon’s rugby community. After playing for Saskatchewan Rugby’s U16 and U18 teams in high school, Sheinin was part of a group of USask students that put together a men’s team at the university. The team competed nationally in rugby sevens through the University of Saskatchewan Rugby Club during the 2011-2012 inaugural season. Sheinin captained the team for a few years thereafter and, after graduating from USask, he helped coach. For the last two years, Sheinin has focused on serving as the head coach of the women’s rugby club at USask, while also coaching the Wild Oats Rugby men’s team for the last few years. 

“I was born and raised in the Vancouver area, where rugby is actually huge—but I had no idea it was a thing there when I was young and living there,” said Sheinin. “I moved to Prince Albert, Sask., when I was about 12, and the school I went to—Prince Albert Collegiate Institute—decided to start a rugby team that year. Everyone was brand new to rugby, so they had to teach from the ground up.” 

Through rugby, Sheinin has realized his passion for coaching and teaching others. 

“I just really try to make sure that the players are growing as rugby players and as people, even, outside of rugby,” he said. 

It was after graduating from USask that Sheinin became focused on both coaching rugby and taking part in competitive professional whistling. His passion for competitive whistling was discovered after an Internet search led him to a video of a Hollywood whistling competition; he immediately knew that he should audition. Although Sheinin’s audition led him to the top bracket of the next competition in Hollywood, his first competition, in 2017, didn’t go as planned. 

“I was deathly nervous and afraid on stage, and it’s hard to whistle when your lips are quivering and that sort of thing,” he said. “I didn’t know how to choose a song.”

That’s not a problem anymore. Today, after almost a decade as a professional whistler, Sheinin has calmed his nerves and has excelled at numerous competitions. He enjoys performing pop songs and can also whistle classical tunes. Despite having no previous musical training, he now receives coaching from retired USask School for the Arts faculty member Garry Gable in advance of international competitions.

Life as a professional whistler has had an unexpected bonus: it led to love. Sheinin met his partner, Maia, by whistling Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean on a dating app.

Whistling has also led to recognition outside of international whistling competitions. Earlier this year, Sheinin was happy to be selected as one of CBC Saskatchewan’s Future 40 winners. CBC Saskatchewan recognizes Saskatchewanians under the age of 40 who are making a difference in their communities. For Sheinin, it was “a very big honour” to be recognized for his work in tech, for his involvement in the rugby community, and for his talents as a professional whistler.

“There’s a lot of interesting things that you can do in the world. And so, I found a few things that I enjoy, and I try to move them forward as much as I can,” he told the CBC.