[dofm]

  Carter?
  "Yes sir?"
  What is it, Carter?
  "An ocarina, sir"
  Bring it up here!

I've had a really nice, small "English four-hole" unglazed terracotta pendant ocarina since I was a kid. They are actually really fun to play and very visceral, in a sense; the way you can get a chromatic scale from only four hole sizes combinatorially is intellectually satisfying and weirdly easy to learn.

It came with some sheet music that shows each note as a box with four dots in it that can be shown as either open or closed:

https://ocarinasongbook.com/fingering-charts/four-hole/

It sounds unusually sophisticated — perhaps even better after forty-plus years -- and it's actually a relatively new design. The ocarina is ancient but the four hole chromatic design dates from the 1960s, so it's newer than those Gretsch ocarinas in the article.

You can get them in all sorts of shapes and sizes -- Thomann sell hand-painted clay 4H ocarinas in the shapes of strawberries and clownfish.

I wish we'd been taught to play these in school instead of with those Aulos descant recorders that everyone in British schools, particularly teachers I imagine, grew to hate.