The Mexica culture developed several wind instruments. Among them, the ehecachichtli stands out, known worldwide as the Aztec death whistle. It is a ceramic object in the shape of a skull that emits a unique sound described by listeners as “a disturbing scream.”
The morphology of death whistles is well known and their replication is simple. Thanks to this, it is possible to create modern ehecachichtli that allow you to recreate its characteristic sound. On the Internet there are endless videos where you can witness “the scream” of these instruments. However, as to its true purpose, anthropologists and archaeologists do not agree.
There are several hypotheses about the original function of death whistles, from those that include a mortuary ritual function, to those that mention that they are protective talismans. Added to these are those that dictate that they were used to intimidate rivals. In any case, the scientific answer is the same: there is not enough evidence to support one or the other.
Sound does incite fear, says science
The theory that popular culture leans most towards is that of its use to terrorize rivals. To prove it, scientists emphasize, It is necessary to know the psychological effects that this instrument causes in modern human beings. With the idea of answering that question, a team of neuroscientists from the University of Zurich experimented with an exact replica of a pre-Hispanic ehecachichtli and observed what it did to the behavior of 70 test subjects.
According to their research, published in Communication Psychologydeath whistles are predominantly perceived as frightening and aversive. Psychoacoustic tests show that people associate ehecachichtli sounds with fear, even when they do not know their origin. Later measurements with MRI showed that the participants’ brains registered activity related to alertness states while associative processing areas in the frontal cortex were activated.
“Skull whistles appear to be unique sonic tools with specific psychoaffective effects on listeners, and Aztec communities may have capitalized on their frightening and screaming nature,” the report notes.
One of the unexpected results about the study of death whistles is their apparent acoustic ambiguity. According to the study, one of the reasons why the sound is so disturbing is because it sounds like a human scream, but it is never identical to a real one. It is an effect similar to that of the “uncanny valley”, a predominant psychological phenomenon in robotics in which the imitation of behaviors very similar to those of humans, far from awakening empathy, causes a distancing between people and the product.
“Skull whistle sounds attract mental attention by affectively imitating other aversive sounds produced by nature and technology. They were classified psychoacoustically as a hybrid mixture of a voice or a scream, but also with elements of technical mechanisms,” the document concludes.
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