The scary sound of Aztec skull whistles
caneuro.github.io
caneuro.github.io
Depending on how you place your lips and shape your mouth, you can get semi-white-noise sounds from soft to harsh, or you can shape the noise into something more like a scream/shriek.
It's funny seeing them turn up on HN just a month after using them in person :)
My initial reaction to reading the title was "there better be a play button involved". Check. Reading the article this page is associated to see how/why these sound like they do, and wondering what the first person to figure this out was like.
> A team of cognitive neuroscientists at the University of Zurich, has found that ancient Aztec "skull whistles" found in gravesites are able to instill fear in modern people. In their study, published in the journal Communications Psychology, the group recorded the neural and psychological responses of volunteers as they listened to the screams produced by the whistles.
...
> The volunteers exhibited similar reactions—certain low-level cortical auditory regions of the brain became instantly activated, indicating that they were on high alert. They also found that the volunteers said the sound made them feel frightened and aversive—they wanted it to stop. The researchers also found that the whistle sound tended to confuse the brain, leaving it reeling momentarily. This, they suggest, hints at the possibility that the whistle was used during ceremonies surrounding the dead, possibly as a way to frighten attendees.
https://phys.org/news/2024-11-ancient-aztec-skull-instill-mo...
> Evil has a sound. It's the sound of humans screaming in agony as they die. Aztecs made implements to simulate this sound. They have been found in the hands of sacrificial victims… the Aztecs considered the ceremonial experience incomplete without the screaming, and built death whistles to simulate the proper sound of agony.
> The article wonders why, but the answer is obvious. The factual piece missing from the article is that sacrificial victims were drugged into semi-consciousness so they wouldn't struggle and disrupt the ceremony.
> This meant they didn't scream as obsidian knives were penetrating their chests and their hearts were ripped out to be offered to the gods. Obviously, the Aztecs considered the ceremonial experience incomplete without the screaming, and built death whistles to simulate the proper sound of agony.
Makes my skin crawl.
Maybe not the best Thanksgiving music, but who are we to judge?
[1]https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1aRqJ7PFZswy4JJ1QJi0Hd?si=...
Spicy take: Aztec society was right up there with Sparta in terms of being some of the most fucked up shit ever on this planet.
> The Patrician took a sip of his beer. ‘I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.’
- Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals
As far as "an otter eating a fish alive", that's not cruel or evil, that's survival. Weird quote, man.
https://www.fox26houston.com/news/elephant-kills-indian-woma...
that, and cats, cats can be very vengeful creatures
And just to give another data point that some animals chase joy: there are certain types of dolphins and monkeys that use animal toxin to get high.
Time for you to go back to the school benches, man.
The Celts, if the Roman authors are to be believed, were pretty metal. Sacrifice, impalement, hanging severed limbs or running into battle with them (naked, drenched in their blood), etc.
Vikings were pretty brutal, both in their raiding/raping/pillaging/murder, and their treatment of slaves, their enemies, and people who committed crimes. Slaves [typically female] were killed and buried with their masters (similar to Egyptian and other ancient cultures), but not before being gang-raped in a drug/alcohol stupor and stabbed to death.
Medieval Europe could be pretty atrocious. Besides the harshness of life for most of the population and their indebtedness to the nobility and church, punishments were often incredibly brutal for even minor crimes, and many punishments extended to not adhering to religious dogma. Plenty of ethnic and religious cleansing to go around then too.
The Maori, Hawaiians, and other polynesian groups could be pretty brutal, torturing, killing and eating their victims. Ritual sacrifice of slaves was common, sometimes throwing children into the sea (the Guanches).
African American slaves (you know, the people whose labor we built our nation on, during/after which we committed ethnic genocide against all the native peoples here?) were worse treated than Helots. At least Helots got to live quasi-normal lives, keeping some of their produce, raising families, having homes. We killed something like three Nazi Holocausts-worth of African Americans, after brutalizing them for centuries. So Western Culture definitely is up there with the most brutal societies.
Native Americans could be pretty brutal too, regularly involved with scalping, skinning, torturing, on occasion forcing their victims to consume... themselves.
Nazi-era Germany and the USSR were also pretty brutal, with Russia having a muuuuch larger death toll, literally starving their own citizens in addition to the work/death camps for crimes such as political disagreement, wrong ethnicity/gender/sexual identity, and various crimes.
But, yeah, Aztecs win the most-fucked-up-practices-in-history award.
- put the person in an immobile metal suit and hang them and leave them for days so crowds can throw stuff at them and taunt them. if they didn't die from exposure they'd certainly be emotionally damaged
- put someone's feet in a metal boot, and then drive wedges into the boot to slowly break all the bones in their feet
- clamp blocks with spikes around the knee, and tighten them down until the knee is totally destroyed
- clamp a person's fingers in a vice and screw until broken. this can be done for days, weeks, as they won't die, and more torture methods still await
- waterboarding. doesn't sound bad, but being repeatedly drowned for hours is, well, not fun
- putting somebody in a sack, with a dog, a snake, and a rat, and throwing them in the water to watch what happened
- tying a person to a giant wheel, smashing their limbs until they were dead, and then hoisting the wheel up for the public to gawk at
- clamp a sort of clawed device onto a woman's breast, and tighten it down until it rips her breast off
- cutting off heads, putting them on spikes, adorning the town or a castle with them (seems quaint in comparison)
- tie a person to a rack, and literally cut all the skin off their body while they are alive. they would die from either shock or blood loss, this is a quicker death than many others
- tying someone to a rack, slowly stretching them until their bones and skin broke, and then dragging them over to the scaffold where they'd be burned alive
- make a sharp metal narrow pyramid and lower a person down on it until it penetrates their anus
- tie the person to a table, attach a cage to their chest, put a rat in the cage, and apply fire to the other end of the cage. the rat claws and gnaws its way through the body of this live person
- tie somebody to a chair made of spikes, and slowly push them towards a fire
- tie somebody upside down, legs spread, and literally saw them in half, from the anus to the head
Soooooooooooo..... yeah..... fetishization of maximal pain and suffering..... honestly, I'm gonna call it, the Aztecs were amateurs compared to us.
A lot of the designs are quite clever. That said, I pray I never come anywhere near any of those devices.