Here were the four they rated as the least irritating:Įven more interesting than the rankings were the parts of the brain that lit up with activity when the research participants heard the irritating noises. They also played the participants a number of more pleasant noises. Their top ten most irritating sounds, with links to audio files for the worst five (although we can’t imagine why you’d want to listen): As part of their research, published last week in the Journal of Neuroscience, they put 16 participants in an MRI machine, played them a range of 74 different sounds and asked them to rate which were most annoying. When it comes to noises that bother everyone’s ears, it’s seemingly a given that scraping fingernails across a slate board is the one that everyone hates most.īut when a group of neuroscientists decided to test which sounds most upset the human brain, they discovered that fingernails on a chalkboard isn’t number one. It’s so universal that it’s become a cliché: nails on a chalkboard. A new study examines which sounds are most unpleasant to the human ear.

You wanna hear the most annoying sound