Ancient Aztec death whistle still terrifies people today, study finds and you can listen if youre brave enough

Its fear-splitting screech reverberates throughout space and time.Swiss and Norwegian neuroscientists have discovered that the ancient Aztec death whistle — often credited with emitting the scariest sound on earth — still terrifies people today due to a primal fear response.They revealed their spine-tingling finding in the journal Communications Psychology where it’s currently scaring up interest online.“We show that skull whistle sounds are predominantly perceived as aversive and scary and as having a hybrid natural-artificial origin,” wrote the researchers, who hail from the University Of Zurich.These small, skull-shaped whistles were exhumed from gravesites dating back to between 1250 and 1521 AD, leading researchers to believe that they were related to the afterlife.When archaeologists blew into these creepy kazoos, they emitted an unearthly, banshee-like shriek similar to a haunted house’s sound effect.

The Aztecs modeled the death whistle after the human larynx, so that when blown into, the wind splits in two, producing oscillating sound waves that bounce around a large chamber before exiting via a second hole — like the velociraptor voice box from “Jurassic Park”To test if this instrument of terror still resonated today, the researchers asked 70 European volunteers to interpret various sounds, including the scare-horn’s trademark scream.Participants didn’t know beforehand that the whistle would be included, removing any preconceptions of it ahead of the experiment, Science Alert reported.During the test, researchers asked volunteers to describe the sensation while simultaneously monitoring some of them with a device that measured their neural and psychological responses to the death whistle.

Scientists found that the sound activated certain low-level auditory regions of the brain, suggesting that they were on edge.Meanwhile, the volunteers claimed that the sound made them feel scared and aversive to the point that they wanted it to sto...