President Rousseff has a go on the official World Cup rattle – the caxirola

If you thought South Africa’s vuvuzelas were annoying during the 2010 World Cup, Brazil 2014 might not be much better for you.

Brazil is set to raise the roof on its stadiums with percussion instruments based on traditional indigenous tribal pieces: the caxirola and the pedhuá.

The caxirola, pronounced ca-shi-RO-la, is a type of rattle – somewhere between rainsticks and maracas – based on a indigenous instrument which used dried beans called the caxixi.

The caxirola name comes from joining of the words caxixi and castanhola (“castanets”), and was presented for the World Cup by musician Carlinhos Brown after an investment of R$1 million (US$442,000) in the project.

It has been given a “ringing endorsement” by Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff.

It features the national colours, and is a ‘green’ plastic in the other sense as well, fitting with the country’s role in global sustainability after it hosted the Rio+20 summit in 2012.

The pedhuá bird whistle replicates the noise of a bird in the tinamou family.

The pedhuá, pronounced peh-doo-AH, is a type of bird whistle, and also has indigenous roots.

The instrument is used to imitate the calls of ground-living birds in the tinamou family, known as inhambus in Brazil, on which natives used to feed (and still do in some places).

The whistle attracts both the birds themselves and those animals intrigued by the call.

The pedhuá, which is capable of making a deafening explosive whistling noise, hails from Paraíba state in the dry, scrubby sertão habitat of the northeast of Brazil.

Expert pedhuá players can imitate the back-and-forth calls of the male and female tinamous, which attempt to relocate each other in the mornings after a night of hiding.

The Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) has licensed the whistle for official World Cup use.

You can see a video report on Globo News (in Portuguese) about the pedhuá here.