Sickening — worst sound in the world announced

Vomiting is officially the most horrible sound ever, according to over a million votes cast worldwide in a mass online science experiment.

International visitors to the BadVibes website (www.sound101.org) — a research project from the University of Salford — listened to sounds such as a dentist's drill, fingernails scraping down a blackboard and aircraft flying past, before rating them in terms of their unpleasantness.

Although fingernails scraping down a blackboard is said to be the worst sound by many people, the actual recording of this sound only came 16th out of 34 sounds auditioned. Microphone feedback came a close second in the 'horribleness ranking', with many babies crying coming joint third with a horrible scrapping sound.

Over 1.1m votes were statistically analysed by Professor Trevor Cox of the University's Acoustic Research Centre, who conducted the experiment in order to explore the public's perceptions of unpleasant sounds and help inform the acoustics industry.

He said: "I am driven by a scientific curiosity about why people shudder at certain sounds and not others. 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.

"Similarly, the sound of fingernails down a blackboard has been compared to the warning cries of monkeys — again, something that humans might instinctively respond to because of our ancestry. So we examined whether the voting patterns for the scraping sounds were consistent with an evolved response. But only for the worst scraping sound were the results consistent with the hypothesis of an evolved response."

One of Trevor's discoveries was 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. He said: "This may be because women play a role in protecting both themselves and their offspring from attack. It could be that females have become habituated to the sound of babies crying."

Trevor, who is now planning a similar experiment to rate the most pleasant sound in the world, is hoping to use the results of the BadVibes project to help inform industry about how to engineer sounds which are more pleasant.

He said: "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. This is so important because noise significantly affects our quality of life."

www.sound101.org/