We had a group of six people using 3D-printed skull whistles for an outdoor festival/theatre/ritual event, emulating the sound of shrieking storm winds. It was incredibly atmospheric, and the sound carries surprisingly far!
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 :)
Finally, a headline that actually matches the content.
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.
Indeed actually scary. This was in science news recently:
> 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.
> 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.
I've been meaning to try to 3d print one of these. There was a meme video about someone doing a batch of 200 to give out on Halloween, and it made me wonder if a plastic one would yield the same sounds.
I printed a few for halloween this year. I found that the angle and strength of blowing made a huge difference. I'd say that I was able to pretty much recreate the sounds in the linked recordings. The benefit of the 3d-printed once is that you can have one with the face of Jeff Bezos.
Sounds on brand for people who regularly tortured children to death so that their tears would placate the gods and fertilize the Earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%A1loc
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.
Indifference isn't a virtue. If you try to pursue it, know that wherever the lines are, someone can push them even further. The sadist will always outpace the stoic.
I’m not a vegetarian or animal rights advocate, but an argument could be made that cruelty to non-human animals is similarly normalized in today’s world, perhaps seen as a necessary evil to satisfy our appetite for food or fashion items.
I don't know if Sparta would crack the top 10 for me.
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.
The systematic, public aspect of the killings and the fetishization of maximal pain and suffering is the fucked up part. Few societies ever where public delight in unthinkable cruelty was so off-the-charts.
Readit News
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=...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z33HIAFuKoQ
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 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.