A year-long quest to identify the worst sound in the world ended yesterday with top honours going to the backdrop of market town Britain on a Saturday night: a person vomiting. The sound, recreated for acoustics experts by an actor with a bucket of diluted baked beans, won out over fingers being dragged down a blackboard, a dentist's drill and wailing babies in an online study that attracted 1.1m votes from around the world.
Microphone feedback, crying babies and the scrapes and squeaks of a train on a track ranked second and joint third, with a cat howling and mobile phone ringtones coming joint 12th and snoring an unexpectedly low 26th.
The study, set up by Trevor Cox, a professor of acoustic engineering at Salford University, sought opinions on 34 sounds at the website www.sound101.org in the hope of learning what makes certain noises so objectionable.
In general, horrible sounds became worse as people aged, but for some sounds the picture was more complex. The sound of eating an apple revolted people less as they aged. The sound of a dentist's drill ranked worst among the under-10s and those in their 40s to 50s. "These are the ages when you are most likely to experience the dentist's drill, so these people could well be more sensitive," said Prof Cox.
Top 10
1. Vomiting
2. Microphone feedback
3. Wailing babies
4. Train scraping on tracks
5. Squeaky seesaw
6. Poorly played violin
7. Whoopee cushion
8. Argument in a soap opera
9. Mains hum
10. Tasmanian devil
More here.
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