Nor­folk is known for its net­work of rivers and lakes, its stock of medieval church­es, and for being the home coun­ty of Alan Par­tridge. Last year, it quite lit­er­al­ly unearthed anoth­er mark of dis­tinc­tion in the form of an iron age war trum­pet. “The bronze trum­pet or carnyx is only the third ever found in Britain, and the most com­plete exam­ple dis­cov­ered any­where in the world,” writes the Guardian’s Esther Addley. “Fash­ioned in the shape of a snarling wild ani­mal, the object would have been mount­ed on a long mouth­piece high above the heads of war­riors, allow­ing it to be sound­ed to intim­i­date the ene­my in bat­tle.” One could hard­ly hope for a more pow­er­ful sym­bol of Celtic fear­some­ness.

Yet “there are many con­tra­dic­tions” in the longer sto­ry of the carnyx, says envi­ron­men­tal sci­en­tist Paul Whitewick in his new video, “from where it’s been found to its intend­ed use, its depic­tion on art and coins: none of those seem to make sense.” The most famous head of a carnyx was uncov­ered in a Scot­tish peat bog; anoth­er came out of the Riv­er With­am in Lin­colnshire.

In addi­tion to those recov­er­ies from non-bat­tle­field set­tings, one detailed iron­work pan­el com­mon­ly ref­er­enced in carnyx recon­struc­tion presents its use in more of a pro­ces­sion. It also became a sym­bol on Roman-era coinage, and with an appar­ent­ly wide range of mean­ing. Per­haps the carnyx was a war horn; per­haps it was much more.

Wher­ev­er the ancients typ­i­cal­ly broke them out, carnyces aren’t for dis­cussing, but for hear­ing. None was sound­ed for two mil­len­nia, until the recon­struc­tion of the one found in the peat bog, known as the Desk­ford Carnyx. The first musi­cian to give it a blow, in 1993, was John Ken­ny, who’s been known as the world’s fore­most carnyx play­er ever since. He does so in the video just above from Nation­al Muse­ums Scot­land, which offers not just the instru­men­t’s haunt­ing sound, but a close-up view of its wag­ging tongue. Ken­ny, too, believes that carnyces have uses beyond war, and even that “they are more impres­sive when they are played less loud­ly.” Still, just imag­ine how intim­i­dat­ed an ene­my army would feel upon hear­ing a whole line of them sound­ed at once — to say noth­ing of see­ing all those tongues.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Haunt­ing Aztec “Death Whis­tle,” the Instru­ment That Made Sounds Resem­bling a Human Scream

Bronze Age Britons Turned Bones of Dead Rel­a­tives into Musi­cal Instru­ments & Orna­ments

Hear a Pre­his­toric Conch Shell Musi­cal Instru­ment Played for the First Time in 18,000 Years

Hear the World’s Old­est Instru­ment, the “Nean­derthal Flute,” Dat­ing Back Over 43,000 Years

Dis­cov­er the Appre­hen­sion Engine: Bri­an Eno Called It “the Most Ter­ri­fy­ing Musi­cal Instru­ment of All Time”

Hear the Trip­py Mys­ti­cal Sounds of Giant Gongs

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Were we to take bets on the sin­gle most wide­ly heard alarm clock, the one includ­ed on the Bea­t­les’ “A Day in the Life” would sure­ly be a pop­u­lar choice. It comes, you’ll recall, at the begin­ning of the song’s mid­dle sec­tion, when Paul takes over from John and sings about wak­ing up, comb­ing his hair, catch­ing a bus, and hav­ing a smoke. Giv­en the lyrics’ sub­ject mat­ter, its inclu­sion seems nat­ur­al, and even like one of the most straight­for­ward­ly explic­a­ble choic­es in the entire record­ing. In fact, the alarm clock was nev­er meant to stay in the mix: the band’s assis­tant Mal Evans set it off as a gag after doing a place­hold­er count of 24 mea­sures in the mid­dle of the ses­sions, but it just hap­pened to work per­fect­ly with the form the song even­tu­al­ly took.

That’s just one of the for­tu­itous acci­dents music YouTu­ber David Hart­ley recounts in the video above, on the com­plete mak­ing of “A Day in the Life.” As most Bea­t­les fans know, John real­ly did take his ini­tial inspi­ra­tion from the news­pa­per, and in par­tic­u­lar a cou­ple of arti­cles about a Guin­ness heir’s fatal car crash and 4,000 holes in Black­burn, Lan­cashire.

But after he wrote his vers­es, he found him­self at a loss as to how to devel­op the song from there. Paul offered the bit he’d already writ­ten about falling out of bed and drag­ging a comb across his head. It was­n’t long before the Bea­t­les began record­ing — and doing so for the first time, Hart­ley notes, before hav­ing fin­ished writ­ing the song. They had dis­parate pieces of music to join togeth­er, but no idea, yet, of how they’d do it.

Hence those 24 emp­ty bars. Play­ing a series of ear­ly takes, Hart­ley shows how they got to be filled in, draw­ing heav­i­ly on Here, There, and Every­where: My Life Record­ing the Music of the Bea­t­les, the mem­oir of engi­neer Geoff Emer­ick. John’s idea of “a sound that began real­ly small, and then grad­u­al­ly expand­ed into some­thing huge” inspired Paul’s sug­ges­tion of a sym­pho­ny orches­tra, in response to which pro­duc­er George Mar­tin expressed con­cerns about the cost of hir­ing one. Ringo, in turn, jok­ing­ly pro­posed hir­ing half the orches­tra and hav­ing them play the part twice, which turned out to be a prag­mat­ic solu­tion. As for how to end a song like this, the use of “maybe the most famous sin­gle chord in record­ed his­to­ry” — fol­lowed by “a high-fre­quen­cy tone only dogs could hear and a short loop of non­sense sound” — came as the result of a process we can only call Beat­lesque.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How John Lennon Wrote the Bea­t­les’ Best Song, “A Day in the Life”