Art, History

Death Whistle | | UZH

Many ancient cultures used musical instruments in ritual ceremonies. Ancient Aztec communities from the pre-Columbian period of Mesoamerica had a rich mythological codex that was also part of their ritual and sacrificial ceremonies. These ceremonies included visual and sonic iconographic elements of mythological deities of the Aztec underworld, which may also be symbolized in the Aztec death whistle. Their skull-shaped body may represent Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec Lord of the Underworld, and the iconic screaming sound may have prepared human sacrifices for their mythological descent into Mictlan, the Aztec underworld.

Aztec death whistles have a unique instrumental construction

To understand the physical mechanisms behind the whistle’s shrill and screeching sound, a team of researchers at the University of Zurich led by Sascha Frühholz, Professor of Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, created 3D digital reconstructions of original Aztec death whistles from the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. The models revealed a unique internal construction of two opposing sound chambers that create physical air turbulence as the source of the screeching sound. “The whistles have a very unique construction, and we don’t know of any comparable musical instrument from other pre-Columbian cultures or from other historical and contemporary contexts,” says Frühholz.

Death whistles very, very frightening

The research team also obtained sound recordings of original Aztec death whistles as well as from handmade replicas. Listeners rated these sounds as extremely chilling and frightening. The Aztec death whistle seems to acoustically and affectively mimic other deterring sounds. Most interestingly, human listeners perceived the sound of the Aztec death whistle to be partly of natural and organic origin, like a human voice or scream. “This is consistent ith the tradition of many ancient cultures to capture natural sounds in musical instruments, and could explain the ritual dimension of the death whistle sound for mimicking mythological entities,” explains Frühholz. 

Affective response and symbolic association

The Aztec death whistle sounds were also played to human listeners while their brains were being recorded. Brain regions belonging to the affective neural system responded strongly to the sound, again confirming its daunting nature. But the team also observed brain activity in regions that associate sounds with symbolic meaning. This suggests a “hybrid” nature of these death whistle sounds, combining a basic psychoaffective influence on listeners with more elaborate mental processes of sound symbolism, signifying the iconographic nature.

Connecting modern humans with Aztec audiences

Music has always had strong emotional impact on human listeners in both contemporary and ancient cultures, hence its use in ritual religious and mythological contexts. Aztec communities may have specifically capitalized on the frightening and symbolic nature of the death whistle sound to influence the audience in their ritual procedures, based on the knowledge of how the sound affects modern humans. “Unfortunately, we could not perform our psychological and neuroscientific experiments with humans from ancient Aztec cultures. But the basic mechanisms of affective response to scary sounds are common to humans from all historical contexts,” says Frühholz.  

Acoustic sound samples: https://caneuro.github.io/blog/2024/study-skullwhistle/

Literature
Frühholz S, Rodriguez P, Bonard M, Steiner F, Bobin M (2024), Psychoacoustic and archeoacoustic nature of ancient Aztec skull whistles. Communications Psychology. 11 November 2024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-024-00157-7

I actually have four of these.

Source: Death Whistle | | UZH

Here’s the sounds they make:

https://caneuro.github.io/blog/2024/study-skullwhistle

Poetry

The Shoelace – Poetic Outlaws

a woman, a
tire that’s flat, a
disease, a
desire: fears in front of you,
fears that hold so still
you can study them
like pieces on a
chessboard…

it’s not the large things that
send a man to the
madhouse. death he’s ready for, or
murder, incest, robbery, fire, flood…
no, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies
that send a man to the
madhouse…
not the death of his love
but a shoelace that snaps
with no time left …

The dread of life
is that swarm of trivialities
that can kill quicker than cancer
and which are always there –
license plates or taxes
or expired driver’s license,
or hiring or firing,
doing it or having it done to you, or
roaches or flies or a
broken hook on a
screen, or out of gas
or too much gas,
the sink’s stopped-up, the landlord’s drunk,
the president doesn’t care and the governor’s
crazy.

light switch broken, mattress like a
porcupine;
$105 for a tune-up, carburetor and fuel pump at
sears roebuck;
and the phone bill’s up and the market’s
down
and the toilet chain is
broken,
and the light has burned out –
the hall light, the front light, the back light,
the inner light; it’s
darker than hell
and twice as
expensive.

then there’s always crabs and ingrown toenails
and people who insist they’re
your friends;
there’s always that and worse;
leaky faucet, christ and christmas;
blue salami, 9 day rains,
50 cent avocados
and purple
liverwurst.

or making it
as a waitress at norm’s on the split shift,
or as an emptier of
bedpans,
or as a carwash or a busboy
or a stealer of old lady’s purses
leaving them screaming on the sidewalks
with broken arms at the age of 80.

suddenly
2 red lights in your rear view mirror
and blood in your
underwear;
toothache, and $979 for a bridge
$300 for a gold
tooth,
and china and russia and america, and
long hair and short hair and no
hair, and beards and no
faces, and plenty of zigzag but no
pot, except maybe one to piss in
and the other one around your
gut.

with each broken shoelace
out of one hundred broken shoelaces,
one man, one woman, one
thing
enters a
madhouse.

so be careful
when you
bend over.

Charles Bukowski

 
Source: The Shoelace – Poetic Outlaws

Climate, Health, Science

‘You’re not the boss of me’ – by Bill McKibben

America’s current conspiratorial politics offers some possibilities for action

Solar power is cheaper. (and those who oppose it know so, and are conspiring to make sure you keep paying them for energy when the sun provides it for free)

It’s more reliable. (and you can plug your EV to your house after a hurricane and run everything for a week).

It’s the ultimate liberty to have your own powerplant on your roof.

It’s far better to have a wind farm in your county than to rely on Saudi Arabia (or Chris Wright).

An electric car goes zero to sixty far faster than your antiquated gas model and it costs half as much to run. (Rich guys in their Teslas are laughing at you)

Because it has fewer moving parts, you don’t have to visit your mechanic nearly as often. You can drive right by the gas station.

Oil companies are a scam, pushing antiquated technology to keep you hooked. They don’t care if you breathe dirty air as long as it makes them money.

Their shareholders are getting rich while you pay for repairing roads and bridges everytime there’s a new climate disaster.

Source: ‘You’re not the boss of me’ – by Bill McKibben

inspiration, Kindness, Monday Musings, motivation

Monday Musings — 18NOV24

It time to Gird your loins folks. It’s time to do battle and get to work.

I don’t think the next 4 years (hope that’s all it will be) is going to be great for lot of people. In fact if Trump does half of what he’s telegraphed, then it’s going to be really shitty. So get ready to put some hard work into the things you feel are important, and that the elites are going to try to fuck up.

I put some resources in last week’s Musings, and a few more since then. Check them out.

So, I’m handicapped. Can drive myself, don’t leave the house as much as I used to (especially in the cold weather), I’m weak (can barely lift myself out of a chair), all that crap. I can write and make art still. Thank goodness for that. Have all (or most) of my faculties. So I can still read, also. I can’t join protests, making it to meetings is, while not impossible, not practical, unless it’s via Zoom or something. It’s not something I worried about, even a couple of years ago, but there you have it. I do what I can. Around the house I do chores, with lots of rest breaks, I cook, etc. I work in my studio, when I can. Some days motivation is damn nigh nonexistent, others it comes back.

So I do my art, I write this blog. Which I hope can be motivating for you all. I donate money to causes (not much). I Zoom with some people who help me motivate to write the comic I’m working on. I do what I can. You should to.

On that note, I’m an old fart, and there’s an organization for older people who want to make a difference. Read about it:

“Experienced Americans” are the fastest-growing part of the population: 10,000 people a day pass the 60-year mark. That means that there’s no way to make the changes that must be made to protect our planet and society unless we bring our power into play.

We’re used to thinking that humans grow more conservative as they age, perhaps because we have more to protect, or simply because we’re used to things the way they are. But our generations saw enormous positive change early in our lives—the civil rights movement, for instance, or the fight to end massive wars or guarantee the rights of women. And now we fear that the promise of those changes may be dying, as the planet heats and inequality grows.

But as a generation we have unprecedented skills and resources that we can bring to bear. Washington and Wall Street have to listen when we speak, because we vote and because we have a large—maybe an overlarge—share of the country’s assets. And many of us have kids and grandkids and great grandkids: we have, in other words, very real reasons to worry and to work.

Art, books, SF

Subterranean Gallery: Russo, Richard Paul

 San Francisco was turning into a jungle–more and more people living in cars, more and more mobs roaming the streets, more and more dangers in day-to-day living.

Rheinhardt was a sculptor who did the best he could in San Francisco… until they drafted his best friend to fight in South America… until his artist’s colony turned into a home for spoiled no-talents… until his girlfriend began to ask him where he was going… until he felt like he couldn’t stand it any more.

Justinian was a mystery man, a Vietnam vet who stalked Rheinhardt quietly, waiting for the right moment. Waiting to take him to Subterranean Gallery.

“Subterranean Gallery is a day-after-tomorrow SF novel with an authentically funky lived-in quality that immediately convinces the reader that its characters and settings are real, that the urban future of the United States is likely to be very much the way Russo imagines it, and that people of compassion and creativity may still find it in themselves to bring forth from oppression and desolation a revivifying hope. Reading Subterranean Gallery is an engrossing, gut-wrenching experience–but ultimately and uplifting one as well.” -Michael Bishop, author of The Secret Ascension

Source: Subterranean Gallery: Russo, Richard Paul: 9780812552591: Amazon.com: Books

Biography, books, History, Life, Politics

“Here I Gather All the Friends”: Machiavelli and the Emergence of the Private Study — The Public Domain Review

I quite like this short essay/biography of Machiavelli. The author of The Prince. (free ebook) Or Barnes & Noble

 

Chutzpah, perhaps? Entitlement, even? Or maybe just an ironic contrast to Vettori, who has access to the real halls of power? Probably all of the above, but it is above all a performance. Machiavelli here uses an ancient rhetorical technique called prosopoeia. From the Greek prósopon (“face, person,” and poiéin “to make, to do”), it is a trope of personification. As the Roman orator Quintilian explains, prosopoeia is used “to introduce conversations between ourselves and others. We are even allowed in this form of speech to bring down the gods from heaven or raise the dead.”8 This is exactly what Machiavelli is doing: he conjures the souls of the dead. After all, every time we read, we breathe into texts whose afterlife exists because of us. We revivify figures that are no longer here. But we are dependent on them in turn — they give us a storehouse of language and ideas, and we make them live again through our own words and voices. Reading as necromancy, then.

 

W. E. B. Du Bois may have been thinking about Machiavelli when he wrote in The Souls of Black Folk (1903): I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.9

Source: “Here I Gather All the Friends”: Machiavelli and the Emergence of the Private Study — The Public Domain Review