[HN Gopher] Psychoacoustic and archeoacoustic nature of ancient ...
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Psychoacoustic and archeoacoustic nature of ancient Aztec skull
whistles
Author : tosh
Score : 24 points
Date : 2024-11-22 12:03 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| dang wrote:
| The submitted URL was
| https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/11/study-why-aztec-deat....
| Interested readers might want to look at both.
|
| Sound examples related to the paper:
| https://caneuro.github.io/blog/2024/study-skullwhistle/
|
| via:
|
| _The scary sound of Aztec skull whistles_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42181466 - Nov 2024 (27
| comments)
| isoprophlex wrote:
| I went in thinking... haha it's a whistle, how bad can it be.
|
| But jesus fuck that's actually a super terrifying sound!
| PcChip wrote:
| Wow you're not kidding!
| mecsred wrote:
| I respect the rigor here, but I can't imagine "scary scream like
| noise was used to spook people" is a novel idea to anyone. The
| main interesting point to me is that it was categorized as both
| manmade and non manmade. If you wanted a scream you could just
| make one yourself. So I suppose the utility of the instrument is
| that the scream sounds human like but obviously isn't, adding
| some fear of the unknown into the mix?
| dmux wrote:
| >If you wanted a scream you could just make one yourself.
|
| I would personally find it really difficult to produce a scream
| that replicated the sound of abject terror produced by the
| whistle.
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| My abject terror scream is a last chance for comedy.
| zby wrote:
| ESR has a theory:
|
| "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."
| https://x.com/esrtweet/status/1859556171918479626
| dylan604 wrote:
| not everyone is a scream queen with the ability to make that
| kind or any thing else we've been trained to expect as a
| "scream". we've probably all seen movies with armies squaring
| off and then yelling as they charge each other in utter
| stupidity, but that sounds nothing like these whistles. give a
| charging army these to blow in as they charge, and it would be
| a totally different effect. use these while hidden in the tree
| line like in Macbeth so you had to imagine what the thing
| making the noise looked like and it would be even worse. way
| worse than any beating drum could do
|
| psyops are to be thought of as a minor thing at your own peril
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The skull whistles remind me of an experience in Central Asia. I
| was in an expedition camped out in the middle of nowhere, a day's
| drive from the nearest permanent settlement and miles from the
| nearest nomads. It's the middle of the night and this terrifying
| scream like a woman being murdered wakes me up. It was right on
| the edge of sounding inhuman in the same way.
|
| The sound kept happening as I made my way down the ravine in the
| direction of the sound and at the bottom... Camels. Just a normal
| herd of camels fording the river.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Don't know if they're based on the 3d scans mentioned in the
| article but you can find printable STL files for skull whistles
| on all the major 3d model sites. They're not the easiest whistles
| to use but once you get the hang of it, the scream really is
| eerie, though not very loud.
|
| The debate over their use reminds me a bit of the Buck Rogers tv
| show where sometimes Buck was amused by the misperceptions of a
| contemporary historian on the use of certain 20th century
| artifacts, including the belief that a hanging Tiffany lamp was
| some kind of electric salad bowl.
| pkkkzip wrote:
| not sure if anybody has heard the whistle sound before but its
| frightening. I'd imagine tens of thousands of whistles going off
| would strike fear into any invading force
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