Ahwooga is a popular sound made by old timey cars, lusty cartoon wolves and construction workers. Even old timey submarines were submerging to a loud loop of ahwoogas. The guy who invented the Klaxon horn also invented hearing aids, so you do the math there. In the early aughts, the City was just beginning to bustle with automotive traffic, and New Yorkers were using discarded jazz band instruments as car horns. There was a need for something sexier and deafening.
The ahwooga is the next step up from a wolf whistle. Not just for any old lass on the street, the ahwooga is reserved for those birth-givers who are particularly well-endowed, possibly callipygous. It implies a honking of another kind, and also maybe a motorboat.
The ahwooga goes up and down an octave. In the example above, the ah sounds a G3, up to the woo, a G4, and back down again for the ga. It is explicitly sexual, like the in-and-out breathing of some crazed sex-beast.
Inside the cylinder housing is a spring steel diaphragm. The top is pressed down, engaging the teeth that are engraved in the metal. They rotate through a cog wheel and an ahoo sound is made; the gha is made as the wheel slows down.
https://sachsehistoricalsociety.com/stewart-warner-ahooga-horn/
Today’s car horns are usually two-tone, in the interval of a slightly flat major third, and go beep, beep. After cartoons and the patriarchy appropriated the ahwooga, nobody on the road could take the vintage horn seriously anymore. Other drivers mistook your rage for a sexual invitation.
Remember: It’s always a good idea to give people a courtesy tap, because you never know when an unhinged madman will add you to his list of things to do that day.
