I can think of un-oiled car's brakes in the city context and some bat's screeches when I was in the field

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for these- they are certainly sharp sounds! What kind of bats were you hearing in the field? Do you study bats?

I do not study bats and (sadly) I don't know which kind of bats exactly live there. However my study site was: Incachaca (Cochabamba, Bolivia, 17°13'S 65°49'W; 2,450 above sea level ) within the Yungas biogeographical region. In Bolivia bats have been studied mostly by Luis F. Aguirre and there is a book about them, maybe there is information on the particular species in the area in case that information works

Muchas gracias, Daniel por la informacion. Es que la mayoria de los murcielogos emite ultrasonidos, pero los que emiten sonidos audible a nosotros, en mi experiencia, producen sonidos que no son tan fuertes o desagradables en caracter. Por eso estaba curioso cuales murcielogos tienen sonidos audibles que son tan "noxious" que te causen una reaccion fisiologica? Cachai la tecnica? Muchos saludos a Hermann. Y Mario Penna (tu co-autor) fue mi post-doc!

I've had the expience of very high frequencies being quite unpleasant. I'm a bit embarassed to say that I played high frequencies (10-20 kHz) to a class one time to test upper frequency limits, and for a moment I think the speaker was up at too high a volume. Perhaps this relates to the comment that some people find bat calls aversive. Tadarida brasiliensis is one frequency that makes sounds close to the upper limit of human hearing (18-20 kHz). I can hear them and they are not aversive to me, but those are just some thoughts I had as a bat biologist.

Thanks for your comments, Aaron. It seems that a common feature shared by many aversive sounds is high intensity, high-frequency components. For example, the hi-f feedback squeal when a microphone is too close to a speaker in a PA system, for example.

There is a paper about "unpleasant" sounds where chalk on a blackboard is also mentioned: https://www.jneurosci.org/content/32/41/14184

For me, rubbing o a balloon is in the same category of annoying sounds.

Thank you Christoph- a very interesting paper showing the role of the cortical-amygdala pathway in encoding acoustic features and valence (perceived unpleasantness) of sounds. Do you know any paper that describes what features of the sounds cause them to have negative valence?

Peter

There is an old study about fingernails on blackboards: Article Psychoacoustics of a chilling sound

They won the Ig Nobel Prize in 2006...that's why I know the paper :D

Thank you Christoph. Any paper that wins the IgNobel Prize is interesting!

But this one gets right at the core of what I was looking for.

Peter

Low frequency noise (rumble) due to air conditioning or when travelling in a car with a partially open window (thumping) also upsets people

Thank you Norm for this interesting answer. Yours is the first example of a low-frequency upsetting noise that I have collected. In your experience, does the low-frequency or infrasound emanating from wind turbines have an upsetting effect on people?

Peter, Infrasound from wind turbines is NOT an issue, despite the false alarmist statements by some. LFN can be if the turbines are too close eg within 500m. In some atmospheric conditions, there is a resultant amplitude modulation of the sound which can be annoying, just like any beating type of sound.

I think that there are some different sources of response to "noxious" sounds. One is clearly the response to painful (like a crowded downtown) sounds that hurt our auditory system. Other sounds are not painful but are very annoying because it changes our relaxing state, like continuous acute sounds. Another "class" of distressful sounds should be related to innate responses to some sounds, as the sound of rattlesnakes (so stressful that burrow owl chicks mimic this sound, as noticed since XIX century) to several potential predators, or the hypothesis that the sound emitted by some cetaceans can debilitate their prey...

Hi Reuber,

I was referring strictly to your second category- sounds that are not necessarily painful but are very annoying like continuous acute sounds. These are the kind of examples I am looking for. One woman told me that the most annoying sound for her was rubbing her feet across the tiles while taking a shower. This shows that what is a noxious event for one person, is harmless for another.

Thanks,

Peter

Hi, Peter!

I hope you and your family are safe and well.

Being the owner of a piano, I have long been surprised at how many people cannot tolerate someone "pecking" on the piano. Even little kids don't bother me, unless they are pounding, but some people cannot tolerate it. I know when my mother had the piano tuner come to my house when I was young, my brother had to go outside...and he wasn't an "outside" sort of guy! He just couldn't take the peck, peck, peck.

My best,

Peggy

Hi Peggy!

Yes we are all well thanks!!

I have heard about this affliction before- I have always attributed it to the same phenomenon that some people (unfairly) are frustrated with someone who stutters, because they want the person to "get on with it" and finish their thought. The piano "pecking" can have a similar, unfinished, tentative, anxiety-producing quality to it as well.

Warm wishes!

Peter

I believe the sound of mosquito flying would fall into this category. It shares characteristics with other "unpleasant" sounds mentioned above (high pitch, narrow bandwidth), but adverse reaction to this one might actually be adaptive.

Thanks, Jernej! This is certainly a sound that causes many different responses, one being a "call to action" to stop that sound! I hope you and your family are staying well. And I hope to see you in Piran! Peter

Hi Peter. Taking advantage of Jernej’s mention, I would add the very loud sounds of cicadas buzzing very close to our windows, both at our workplace and (now) at home. In some locations, millions of individuals in a collective buzzing can cause a deafening tinnitus, which is spectacular, but also uncomfortable.

Peter,

I guess you know the paper "Scraping sounds and disgusting noises" (Applied Acoustics 69(12)) by Trevor J.Cox. In the examples you received in this thread a sound may be unpleasant because it is loud (cicadas) or a warning (mosquito biting). That's not the case with the well-known chalk or fork scraping; is that unpleasant to a lot of people because of their acoustical characteristics? I'm not sure if that is the case with the foot rubbing or the piano. The piano is perhaps like the irritating phone conversations in the train: it may be irritating because you miss half the conversation (could it be you wait for the piano to actually start playing a melody (which it doesn't)?) and because the voice is louder than in a normal conversation.

But you're looking for sounds that are noxious for one person but harmless for another. In fact, that's quite general: e.g. some of the persons living next to a busy street wil be highly annoyed, but others are not annoyed at all. However, it seems you want to go beyond annoyance: it's about aversive, revulsive, disgusting noises. That's exactly what is described as misophonia: a misophonic person cannot stand some sounds (mostly from other people) that other people apparently ignore.

My wife is very disturbed by my coughing, it really affects her even though she doesn't want to pay attention to it.

Hi Frits,

Thank you for your interesting comments. In your experience, have you found any adverse effects of high-intensity infrasound on people living within close distances to wind turbines? A long while ago I published a paper with an undergraduate in which she collected many anecdotes of adverse affects of this type, but the article received some rather harsh criticism, specifically from researchers funded by the wind generator manufacturers! Is there a consensus today about this phenomenon?

Thank you,

Peter

There are several g.p.'s and other medical doctors who in the past have collected stories about the morbid effect of wind turbine sound on people, so your student was not the only one. I sympathize with them because they wanted to help, and the sad thing is that many operators and authorities don't care about a few complaints. Some people do show severe stress symptoms that may be a consequence of the plans and wind farm itself, in combination with their ideas about the wind farm or wind energy and perhaps their type of person. But it cannot be attributed to only the sound. Of course wind turbine sound can be a nuisance and this can be enhanced by a rhythmic character, as Norman Broner mentioned. And of course it is more annoying if you opposed the plan. But it is sound, not something new that we have no experience with. When you mention 'high-intensity infrasound on people living within close distances to wind turbines' then that sound cannot be from the turbines, because wind turbine sound nor its infrasound part is what we usually call high level.

Of course , this depends on where you live. The noise limits in parts of the USA can be pretty high, and in some cases I fully understand why people want to move out.

Although some studies show there may be a neural effect from below-threshold infrasound, it is entirely unclear what that means: does it affect us in some way? And if so, is that bad? Subaudible sound never was an issue, although there is also experience with infrasound. The pressure variations (that's what the eardrum transmits) in a strong wind are higher than in wind turbine infrasound.

For more arguments see the 2018 review of effects of wind turbine sound by Irene van Kamp and myself.

Thank you for your response Frits. I look forward to reading your 2018 article with Irene van Kamp and you entitled: Health Effects Related to Wind Turbine Sound, Including Low-Frequency Sound and Infrasound.

Peter