Why Is the Sound Made When Nails Rubbing on Wood Disturbing?

Studies have shown that the sound of nail rubbing against wood is at the same frequency as a crying baby and human scream. the urge to survive He says he woke up.

This means that according to the researchers, some people naturally use this frequency. to their discomfort can cause. Studies on this subject talk about some very interesting things. Come on, let’s see what science has to say.

In fact, our ears are naturally programmed to be disturbed by certain sound frequencies.

In a 1986 study, someone was writing on the blackboard with chalk. nails rubbing the wood and recording the sound of this rubbing being received. Researchers want to artificially extract different frequencies of these sounds other than their own frequency and test why people feel uncomfortable with it. Having people listen to these sounds, the researchers asked people to rate how uncomfortable they were.

Even if the academics removed the recording with the highest frequency and continued to listen to the rest, the participants still found the sounds disturbing. This time your voice is medium and in the low spectrum By removing frequencies (in the range), the experts observed that subjects, interestingly, evaluated sounds more positively.

Michael Oehler and Christoph Reuter, who work on music science, in their study in 2011, found that the sound frequencies that people are most disturbed by. 2000 and 4000 Hz (frequency unit). Because people felt the loudest volume in these ranges. In this study with 24 people, the researchers had each of the participants listen to eight sounds at random and asked them to rate the sounds according to the ones they liked or bothered the most.

Of course, the researchers also measured the participants’ skin conductance (the level of electrification of the skin after sweat secretion), pulse, and respiration as the participants listened to these recordings. The purpose of doing this is taking into account physiological responses they want to come to a conclusion. Actually, the interesting thing is that each of these eight sounds is a derivative of the sound of nails rubbing against wood. But there is something else interesting here…

Being conditioned to the source of the sound is another cause of this discomfort.

Researchers complicate things a little more and find out who knows and who doesn’t know the source of the sounds. two groups of participants separates them. They do this because they want to look at what might be causing the situation from a psychological point of view. While one group knows that these sounds are made by rubbing nails against wood, the other group thinks they are an edited version of a piece of music.

The researchers found, however, that the participants’ physical response to sound was not that different. The real different result came from knowing the source of the sound. Those who knew that the sound of nails was rubbing against the wood evaluated the sounds negatively. For example, those who thought it was a musical composition liked the sound more. So the source of the sound be mentally conditioned It is also a factor in the difference in results.

The sharp and rough sound also causes it to be unattractive.

Professor John McDermott, who works in this field, discovered in his research in 2012 that a sound has two sides that do not sound good to our ears. One of them is the sharpness of the sound due to high frequency and the roughness caused by the fluctuation caused by the frequency density. But the academic says people are often bothered by jagged sounds. So let’s say you rubbed your nails on wood, here’s what happens. Since the sound will be rough, it is natural that you cannot bear this sound. In short, we can say that these two aspects are more effective than the frequency of the sound.

Sources: Live Science, Popular Science