'Most Annoying Sound' Is Stomach Turning
Jan. 25, 2007 — -- From the sound of the alarm clock in the morning and the coffee maker burbling to another workday of traffic, horns, subway trains and voices, noise is unavoidable.
Some of those sounds may amuse us and some may trigger pleasant memories, but many are just downright irritating. One professor at a British university has made a study of the sounds that really get on our nerves.
The Internet study, overseen by England's Salford University lecturer Trevor Cox, took a year to complete and involved people listening to 37 sounds on his Web site, sound101.com, and rating them on a scale of irritability.
Cox says his site received more than a million hits since its inception and the votes were then statistically analyzed using the latest acoustic techniques.
The list includes grating sounds such as fingernails scratching a blackboard, babies crying and the ubiquitous cell phone ring tones.
But at the very top of the list is the Saturday night "out on the razzle, getting spannered and chundering after." Translation: The most irritating sound, according to the online vote, is vomiting.
Programmed to Avoid 'Disgust'
Cox said, in a way, that the finding made sense.
"I was surprised, yet there was so much data to analyze, and given that the U.K. has the highest rate of binge drinking in Europe, which doesn't really come into the equation really, it was not really that surprising," he said.
Most of the sounds were created by researchers, said Cox. To recreate the sound of someone being sick, an actor was hired to provide the grunting sound and a tin of baked beans was slopped into a bucket.
"We are pre-programmed to be repulsed by horrible things such as vomiting, as it is fundamental to staying alive to avoid nasty stuff but, interestingly, the voting patterns from the sound did not match expectation for a pure 'disgust' reaction," he added.
The list is interesting, but it seems there are more important matters to research. Why study horrible sounds?
"I conducted the experiment in order to explore the public's perceptions of unpleasant sounds and help inform the acoustics industry," Cox said. "I am driven by a scientific curiosity about why people shudder at certain sounds and not others…I think we learn more about the human behavior through how we respond to noises."
Cox said he hoped the study would give a better understanding of the reasons behind human emotions such as disgust.
"The reasons for disgust are sometimes quite varied," he said. "We find vomiting disgusting because we are pre-programmed to stay away from disease and other people's body fluids, but there are also reasons of manners and etiquette at play."
Differences Between Men and Women
Another interesting finding was that men and women rated sounds differently.
Cox discovered that females rated 25 out of the 34 sounds more horrible than males. However, baby cries were one of the few sounds males found worse than females.
"This may be because women play a role in protecting both themselves and their offspring from attack," Cox said. "It could be that females have become habituated to the sound of babies crying."
Cox is not planning to end his research at cracking what noises make us cringe. He's planning a similar experiment to rate the most pleasant sound in the world and is hoping to use the results of the project to help inform companies about how to engineer sounds that are more pleasant.
"This research has been fascinating in gaining an insight into why people are repulsed by certain sounds and how this differs by gender, age and nationality," he said. "This is so important because noise significantly affects our quality of life."
Here is the list of most horrible sounds, according to Cox's study:
1. Vomiting
2. Microphone feedback
3. Multiple babies crying
4. Scraping of train wheels
5. Seesaw squeaking
6. Violin
7. Flatulence
8. One baby crying
9. Soap opera argument
10. Electricity hum