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Psychoacoustic and archeoacoustic nature of ancient Aztec skull whistles
A series of psychoacoustic and neuroimaging studies reveal the effect that the sound of Aztec skull whistles has on modern listeners; the sound, which is perceived as a mixture of voice-like, scream-like, and technological, triggers affective processing.
The sound iconography reveals a possible association with Ehecatl, the Aztec God of the Wind, who traveled to the underworld to obtain the bones of previous world ages to create humankind (which we refer to as the “deity symbolism hypothesis”) 2. Human listeners in our experiments rated skull whistle sounds as very negative and specifically labeled them largely as scary and aversive, which potentially also trigger urgent response tendencies and interfere with ongoing mental processes 37. This might greatly contribute to the symbolic and potentially fictional nature of skull whistle sounds 50 and highlights the frequent intention of ancient cultures to capture and represent mythical entities/contexts in musical tools 50, 51, 52.
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