The Pocket Encyclopedia of Aggravation by Laura Lee & Linda O’leary

Author:Laura Lee & Linda O’leary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2017-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

NOISE

See also Car Alarms, Fingernails on the Blackboard, Off-Key Singing.

Your neighbor loves to blast heavy metal music on his stereo. How can he stand to listen to that noise? You’d rather listen to a washing machine that is out of balance. Scientists have attempted to quantify the annoyance factor of sounds with a noise scale, NOY. The problem is that there is little agreement among research subjects as to what is sound and what is noise. Noises are usually loud, for example, but loudness alone does not make a sound annoying to all listeners. A 2013 study in the Journal of Environmental Psychology found that the sort of loud, continuous racket that we normally call “noise” can be experienced as a positive in the right social contexts, such as a religious festival. Other studies have found that we’re more bothered by sounds that are incomprehensible than things like speech in our own language, and that intermittent loud sounds are more bothersome that something ongoing, like traffic noise.

“Noise is a psychological phenomenon,” says environmental psychologist Arline Bronzaft. The ear hears but “it’s the higher senses of the brain that determine whether that sound is unwanted, unpleasant, or disturbing.” Noise, it seems, is loudness plus annoyance.

What experts generally agree upon is that noise is bad for you. Hearing loss, sleep disorders, elevated blood pressure, heart disease, and psychological trauma can be brought on by exposure to noise. One of the earliest studies was conducted in New York City and found that children who live near clattering subway lines have a harder time learning. Other studies have correlated high noise areas with poor reading and math scores in school-age children. Two studies conducted near London’s Heathrow Airport found that areas closest to the airport, with higher levels of noise, also had the highest rates of psychological hospital admissions. Sudden, unexpected noise causes the heart to race, blood pressure to rise, and the muscles to contract. Following a loud bang, digestion, stomach contractions, and the flow of gastric juices all stop. Appropriately enough, the word “noise” is a distant cousin of the word “nausea.” Both evolved out of the Greek nautia and Latin navis, or ship. Nausea was originally used specifically to describe seasickness. Eventually, it was applied to similar discomfort on land. The related word, “noise,” in Latin once was used to describe the fuss surrounding a sick person. In old French it was transformed into an expression for loud disagreement. This term came into English where it was applied to any unpleasant sound.

Researchers at Northwestern University who studied the sounds that make people cringe found that fingernails on a blackboard was, by far, the most universally annoying. What was the second most aggravating noise, according to their subjects? It was the sound of two pieces of Styrofoam rubbing together.

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