Why fingernails on a blackboard sound so horrible

November 03, 2011 16:54

Completely irrelevant in a sense, but makes a good read...

Ever wondered why scraping your nails down a blackboard sounds so awful? It's because human ears are designed in such a way that it amplifies the screeching sound to make it intolerable, scientists say. Researchers from Germany and Austria found that the noise of fingernails on a chalkboard is similar to human speech and human ears are "built" to hear sounds at that frequency.

Nails on a blackboard ranked above sounds such as a fork scraping on a plate and squeaking polystyrene. It was found that the listeners who'd been told they were listening to fingernails were more disgusted and appalled thanthose who hadn't.

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