Aztec Death Whistle

Yes, I'm looking around for items for tomorrow's miscellanea, why do you ask? I just ran across this article about an Aztec musical instrument: The Aztec Death Whistle Makes One of the Scariest Sounds You'll Ever Hear.

We're not going to lie. The sound of the death whistle is the most frightening thing we've ever heard. It literally sounds like a screeching zombie. We can only imagine what it would be like to hear hundreds of the whistles from an Aztec army on the march. We're not entirely certain what the whistles were used for, however. They may have been used as an intimidation tactic in war, but there's one aspect of Aztec society in which they certainly played a role: human sacrifice.

In 1999, a 20-year-old sacrificial victim was discovered by archaeologists, clutching a death whistle in his hands. He was found in a temple to the wind god Ehecatl at Tlatelolco, suggesting to some scholars that the whistles were meant to evoke the howling wind. In any case, modern musicians and anthropologists have grown more interested in the role the whistles played in the ongoing indigenous history of Mexico.

Hm, well, if that is the most frightening thing the author ever heard, I suspect he is not familiar with the electronic music of Karlheinz Stockhausen or Edgar Varèse:

On the other hand, this does give us some insight into why the Spartans marched to the sounds of flutes: maybe their flutes were more scary than we thought!

Marching in step, while perhaps known to other Greeks, was particularly associated with the Spartan army. Famously, their troops at Mantinea advanced towards the Argive army with a slow rhythmic pace to the sound of many flutes, not for a religious reason, as Thucydides explains to his readers, but in order to maintain a steady pace and to prevent the ranks from breaking up, which tended to occur in large armies (5.70).

From here.