[microsound] "Most Horrible Sound in the World"

[Rod Stasick <rod@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The "sound 101" site mentioned below is pretty amusing - take the test!

[links and formatting in original]

http://tinyurl.com/2mkhmt

January 24, 2007, 10:00 am

Most Horrible Sound in the World
By Tom Zeller Jr.

A British researcher says he has uncovered what he
believes is the most horrible sound in the world — or
at least it was rated the most horrible of 34 sample
sounds listened to by over a million Internet
participants over the last year.

A professor at Britain's Salford University, Trevor
Cox, claims to have reached a new plateau in the
understanding of human hearing and acoustics, based on
a year of input from of over a million online test
subjects: Vomiting is the worst sound ever.

Or, at least, vomiting as recorded for Professor Cox's
acoustics tests, and as performed by a hired actor
using a bucket of diluted baked beans to recreate the
sound of cascading slop.

“I am driven by a scientific curiosity about why
people shudder at certain sounds and not others,”
Professor Cox said at his Web site. "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.”

(Readers who feel brave, and wish to listen to the
foul sound clip can do so here, but be warned: it
sounds, well, like someone vomiting.)

As Britain's Guardian newspaper put it today:

The study...sought opinions on 34 sounds at the Web
site http://www.sound101.org in the hope of learning what
makes certain noises so objectionable...

The researchers expected sounds that evoke disgust to
be near the top of the list, such as vomiting,
coughing and spitting, eating an apple with the mouth
open and a lengthy blast from a whoopee cushion.
Revulsion to such sounds is partly governed by culture
and partly an evolutionary legacy that helps us avoid
picking up diseases.

Indeed, the question of just how much of the “disgust”
response is nature and how much is nurture has been a
matter of some speculation. In 2004, researchers at
the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine,
writing in the journal Biology Letters, suggested that
they’d found evidence that the human proclivity to
become disgusted by certain things — say, feces or
rotting meat — was an instinctive and evolutionary
response, developed to protect us from the risk of
disease.

Other researchers, BBC News pointed out at the time,
attribute the disgust response to learned behavior.
Clark McCauley, a professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr
University College in Pennsylvania, spoke to The BBC:

“What people today find disgusting goes far beyond
what can be understood in the evolutionary sense,”
Professor McCauley told BBC News Online.

“This biological mechanism was taken up and extended
to produce a much broader mechanism of revulsion at
different cultural horizons.

“For example, what counts for appropriate care of hair
in our society is not the same as in some other
societies.”

(Readers who want to test their own stomachs can take
a “Disgust Test” at the BBC, in which they are invited
to rate a series of images — from a dirty soccer ball
to rotting teeth — on a scale from “Not Disgusted” to
“Very Disgusted.”)

As for Professor Cox's disgusting sounds study, it's
worth noting that the classic bad sound — fingernails
on a chalkboard — ranked only 16th among the field of
34 horrible sounds. (Note, too, that researchers have
explored whether human revulsion to that sound derives
from its similarity to the warning cries of macaque
monkeys — the idea being that our response to the
scraping might be some residual reflex handed down
from our ancestors.)

Ranking No. 2, just after vomiting, was the sound of
microphone feedback. And tying at number three were
the sounds of many babies crying, and what was simply
called a “horrible scraping” sound.
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