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.

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)

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?

These skull whistles were used by Erykah Badu, Marc Rebillet, and Reggie Watts on their collaborative stream session. It’s quite a fun jam to witness those three discover the sound.

> Skull whistles can produce softer hiss-like ...

If any whistle-like instrument is just hissing, you obviously don't have the hang of it yet.

It's kind of a freaky sound, yes, but seems to me that we wouldn't react like this if it wasn't called a skull whistle. Like, if it were sculpted like a puppy and called the Aztec Doggie Whistle.

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

Not sure if it's remotely correct, but I immediately thought of Bone Tomahawk. <shudders>

You can print one with a 3d printer, they're on thingiverse. Sure to be a hit at parties!

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.