For many people, the sound of a lawn mower is more annoying when it comes from the neighbors than when we’re mowing ourselves. According to experts, the number of decibels doesn’t really say much about how annoyed we are. Sensitivity to noise is an individual thing—and varies from person to person and situation to situation.

For many people, the sound of a lawn mower is more annoying when it comes from the neighbors than when we’re mowing ourselves. According to experts, the number of decibels doesn’t really say much about how annoyed we are. Sensitivity to noise is an individual thing—and varies from person to person and situation to situation.

Traffic pulling away, colleagues chatting, a crying baby across the street… No matter where or when, there are sounds all around us that we might find annoying—but we don’t have to. How sensitive you are to noise is fixed; it’s a personality trait that, at most, becomes slightly more pronounced as you get older, but that you can’t really change. However, various studies show that different factors determine how annoying sounds affect you.

Concentration-killer

Just a quick note about that crying baby next door. You might not even notice that noise all day, but suddenly it can be terribly distracting when you’re trying to do your paperwork in the evening or study for an important exam—in other words, when you want to concentrate. The more focus it requires, the more annoying we find the noise.
The same thing happens when a snoring bed partner drives you crazy while you’re trying your very best to fall asleep, says Tjeerd Andringa, a sound scientist at the University of Groningen. “The snoring doesn’t even have to be loud for that to happen.”

Squeaking and humming

A baby’s cry is highly irritating. American researchers found that this sound is the most effective at distracting test subjects from their task—in this study, solving simple math problems. The sound of a circular saw came in second. And this ranking held true even for test subjects who did not have children of their own. A reader survey conducted by Psychologie Magazine previously identified this top 5 list of the most irritating sounds: a car alarm, snoring, the squeaking of cutlery on a plate, a dentist’s drill, and a moped. It’s no coincidence that two of the five evoke negative associations, such as danger and pain. Such associations are what make a sound truly unbearable to us.

The sound of someone vomiting ranks undisputedly first in British audiologist Trevor Cox’s international study on “the most horrible sound in the world.” Not because the sound itself is particularly horrible, but because vomiting evokes disgust in all cultures.
Also striking: we find sounds made by others more annoying. People therefore rate the noise from someone else’s lawn mower or sander as much more irritating than that from their own appliances. According to sound scientist Andringa, this is because we have little control over it.
Our annoyance is complete when we also feel we’re being treated unfairly by the source of the noise, according to doctoral research by environmental psychologist Eveline Maris at Leiden University. Maris had test subjects solve puzzles with background noise. Half of the participants were not allowed to choose the sound themselves, while the other half were told they could choose between nature sounds, radio sounds, or airplane sounds. Subsequently, everyone was played the airplane noise anyway. The second group felt thoroughly tricked and found the noise much more annoying than the people who had expected airplane noise in advance.
Your expectations of what you’ll hear and your relationship with the person making the sound therefore largely determine how much of it you can tolerate. That’s why you can enjoy loud music at a party, but be absolutely annoyed by that same music when the party is at your upstairs neighbor’s place—especially if you don’t like your neighbor.

Breathing Noises

It’s perfectly normal for us to sometimes get annoyed by loud patio patrons or the roar of revving engines. But there are also people who find smacking, sniffing, and even just breathing so annoying that they’d like to hit the person causing it. These people suffer from the brain disorder misophonia, or “sound hatred,” which is treated at the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam with methods including cognitive behavioral therapy and attention training.
Anyone who is “normally” sensitive to sound does not need therapy. Stress caused by sounds can be easily reduced by simply asking your neighbors to be considerate, actively seeking peace and quiet in nature, and putting things into perspective. Because, as an online survey by Tjeerd Andringa shows: “People who see themselves as victims are the most annoyed.”

How sensitive are you to sounds? Take the test!

Are you easily distracted by the slightest sound, or can you still concentrate even with a drill running nearby? It turns out that people vary greatly in how strongly they react to ambient noise. Take the test!

• SOURCE: Geluidnieuws.nl
• AUTHOR: Saskia Decorte