These cues, known as "triggers", are experienced as unpleasant or distressing and tend to evoke strong negative emotional, physiological, and behavioral responses that are not seen in most other people. Misophonia (or selective sound sensitivity syndrome, sound-rage) is a disorder of decreased tolerance to specific sounds or their associated stimuli, or cues. So what sound absolutely makes you cringe? Or repulses you to the point where you can’t bear to hear it? As a kid I could always make my mom run away in horror by squeaking a piece of Styrofoam against cardboard.Selective sound sensitivity syndrome, select sound sensitivity syndrome, sound-rage Squeaky bike brakes scored high on the list along with the usual suspects (nails on a chalkboard, natch). Each group was asked to rate their discomfort on a scale of one to six, and the folks who thought they were listening to avant garde music gave slightly lower marks to each sound. Prior to playing an assortment of unpleasant sounds to one test group, they informed the volunteers that they would be hearing portions of a performance art piece, while the second group was told the actual source of each sound. Michael Oehler and Christoph Reuter of the University of Vienna added a twist when they conducted their 2011 study. They played a variety of painful noises, including chalk squeaking on a blackboard and a fork scratching a drinking glass, but according to the MRI scans of their volunteers a knife scraping against a bottle was the most excruciating. Scientists at Newcastle University conducted a very precise study in 2012 concentrating on the sounds that registered in the super-sensitive sound frequency range of 2,000 to 5,000 hz. When asked in an interview what sound was his personal bugaboo, Cox (who resides in Manchester, England) admitted that he was likewise squicked out by the dental drill. In all of the South American countries that responded to his survey, the high-pitched whine of a dentist’s drill was the number one sound that made folks shudder. Cox found that certain sounds skewed very differently according to geography. These additional items are culled from other studies: Dental Drillĭr. (Maybe it deserves a place in the Obsolete Sounds graveyard?) But those of us old enough to remember the hair-raising squeak of nails accidentally scraped on slate in elementary school still cringe at the memory. Perhaps it’s because so many schools now use whiteboards instead of chalkboards that this once classic example of an annoying sound ranked so low on the list. (And for the record, I have since curbed my movie theater popcorn-eating noises thanks to constructive criticism from my patient spouse.) 11. Person Chewing Food with an Open MouthĪn apple was the most-mentioned annoying open-mouthed munching sound, but I’m sure you can think of grosser sounds coming from a dining partner who inadvertently invites you to view and listen to his meal via his (or her) gaping maw. That annoying buzz you occasionally hear through speakers…for the audiophiles in the audience, it occurs at 50Hz in the UK and 60Hz in the US. Microphone FeedbackĪs a rule, this one often is physically painful, so I’m not surprised it placed so high on the list. ![]() (For the cast-iron stomached among you, here’s the sound clip used in the test.) 2. ![]() Maybe it was the additional sound effects touch of canned baked beans plopping into a bucket that made the gagging and retching sound number one on the list (skeptics have stated that in this case it’s not the actual sound, but rather the mental picture, that disgusts listeners), but I must state that I simply cannot be within earshot of a puking person, otherwise my own gag reflex involuntarily gets triggered. ![]() The items below are ranked in order of “cringe-worthiness” according to an ongoing study by Professor Trevor Cox of Britain’s Salford University. And second, noises that trigger an immediate negative visceral reaction, like nails on a chalkboard or squeaking Styrofoam. Scientists agree that unpleasant sounds fall into two distinct categories: first, annoying sounds like incessant car alarms and snoring, because they are intrusive and disrupt our thought process (or sleep).
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