The Bullroarer Atlas

No. MUS2026-110

Riwi-riwi löchö, the dry-season insect

Indonesia · Lafau, Nias Island · Southeast Asia

Play / practical

A long curved wooden stick with a broad tapered blade tied near one end by cord.
Plate I. Representative — not this record’s object. Gently curved stick with a narrow wooden blade bound by cord. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Image source

riwi-riwi löchö

Source term: bull-roarer

riwi-riwi löchö: Nias name of the bullroarer and of the whizzing bow (Kunst, Music in Nias, 1939, p. 72); riwi-riwi is a cricket or chirping insect of the dry season.

On Nias, off the western coast of Sumatra, the bull-roarer carries the name of a cricket that chirps through the dry season: riwi-riwi löchö. This one left the village of Lafau for the Smithsonian. On the island the instrument passed as a children's toy, its older work — the imitation of ghostly voices — lapsed.

Particulars

Object
Bull-roarer of the Nias, Smithsonian (NMNH/NMAI).
Function
Not recorded for this object. The Nias instrument is named riwi-riwi löchö after a dry-season chirping insect, and it passed as a children's toy whose magical function — the imitation of ghostly voices — has lapsed.

Source

Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Anthropology, record 8364793 (Lafau, Nias); Jaap Kunst, Music in Nias (1939)

View the source

Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.