Complex Numbers

Acoustic Annoyances

When I was a kid, I was one of those hated assholes who scritched his fingernails down the classroom chalkboard.

Which Sounds Are the Most Annoying to Humans?  

I think all the schools have gone to dry-erase whiteboards now, which is a shame, because the occasional squeak of a marker on those surfaces just doesn't have the same effect, and entire generations no longer know the joy of the ear-piercing screech of keratin on slate.

Earlier this month, a kind of chirping, rainforest-y sound sprung up in my apartment. It came from my roommate’s room.

Lame. I once bought one of those Annoy-A-Trons from the late, great ThinkGeek website, and hid it in my office. It drove my business partner up the wall. Well, for a few minutes, anyway; that's how long it took for me to break down in uncontrollable laughter.

For anyone who doesn't know, the Annoy-A-Tron, formerly the Mind Molester, was a little battery-powered device that, every three minutes or so, emits a beep in the exact wavelength that renders the sound's origin impossible to locate by human ears. Someone somewhere might still have something like that for sale; I don't know, because I'm not about to prank my housemate with it. That could lead to retaliation, and pranks are, by definition, only funny when they're not played on me.

This is all to say that, when we are speaking about sounds, “annoying” is a subjective criteria. But there must be, one figures, some consensus on the subject. For this week’s Giz Asks we reached out to a number of sound-experts to find out what that might be.

"Criteria" is plural. The singular is "criterion." Since we're talking about shit that annoys me.

But before I go on, let me take a stab at the sounds most annoying to humans, apart from the aforementioned fingernails on the blackboard or Annoy-A-Tron.

Amplifier feedback.

"I want to speak to your manager."

A pothole on the interstate near my house, which, when it's run over, produces a thump-the-bump noise.

The drip of water from a leak in your roof.

The neighbor's goddamn night-owl of a mutt.

A phone's Amber Alert notification (which is one reason I have Amber Alerts turned off).

That muscle car from the 70s with a 2-stroke engine and defective muffler that cruises the nearby streets.

Any alarm that wakes me up.

For some reason, every house in my neighborhood has to get its lawn mowed successively. So by the time one annoying lawnmower is done, another has started up.

Okay, let's see what the article has to say.

The sound of vomiting: elicits a visceral response.

Huh. I never noticed. Usually it's me doing the vomiting, though.

The article goes on to explain, from an evolutionary perspective, why that sound is annoying. It's fairly interesting, but I suspect there's a lot of speculation.

Pretty much all the other sounds are sounds that are relevant to higher cognition. So the scraping of fingernails on the chalkboard probably also has a visceral component, but it’s much further away from our basic responses than vomiting.

At least they don't make up an evolutionary psychology reason for that one.

A baby crying does not make sense for all mammals; it only makes sense for mammals that have babies that actually cry.

Ah, yes, the "baby crying" entry, which I forgot above. Because I avoid that as much as possible. One time I was in an airport, and a baby was crying, and there was also a cat yowling in a carrier. A baby's cry supposedly makes an adult human want to comfort it. Not me. I want to get as far away from it as possible. The cat, though, I felt sorry for and I wanted to take it out and pet it.

In general, though, the most annoying sounds are those that get in the way of whatever you’re trying to do.

That's very general. But fair.

The most annoying sound for a human, as we all know, is the sound of chalkboard scraping. It’s terrible! Precisely why that is so remains a bit of a mystery and—I kid you not—the subject of ongoing psychoacoustic research.

If you look at the article, these are from several different experts, hence the repeats. But yeah, there's another vote for the anachronistic chalkboard thing.

This particular answer goes on to describe music -- how what's pleasing to one person can be rage-inducing in another.

And to summarize the final entry: early heart-valve replacements. Yeah, that would mess me right up. You're trying to sleep and your ticker just keeps ticking... and ticking... and ticking...

It's been a while since I've done a Merit Badge Mini-Contest. I was going to do my one-sentence review of Free Guy tonight, but that can wait; let's give out a Merit Badge.

Merit Badge Mini-Contest!!!

You knew this was coming: what sound do YOU find most annoying? Apart from fingernails on a chalkboard; that's been done to death already. I'll pick an answer (preferably one that also annoys me) and send that person a Merit Badge tomorrow (Sunday). Deadline, as usual, is midnight WDC time at the end of today, Saturday, August 14.