Studies show that the sound of nail rubbing against wood is at the same frequency as a crying baby and human scream, and this frequency awakens the survival instinct.
According to the researchers, this may cause some people to naturally feel uncomfortable with this frequency. 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 study conducted in 1986, while someone was writing on the blackboard with chalk, their nails were rubbing against the board and the sound produced by this friction was recorded. 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, the experts, who removed the frequencies in the middle and low spectrum (range) of the sound, observed that the subjects evaluated the sounds more positively, interestingly.
Michael Oehler and Christoph Reuter, who work on music science, found in their study in 2011 that the sound frequencies that people are most disturbed by are between 2000 and 4000 Hz (frequency units). 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 that they want to reach a conclusion by taking into account the physiological responses. 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.
To complicate things further, the researchers separate two groups of participants who know the source of the sounds and those who don’t. 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 main difference is the result of 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. Thus, we can say that being mentally conditioned to the source of the sound is also a factor in the differentiation of the 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 the wood, it’s natural that you can’t stand the sound because the sound produced there will be rough. In short, we can say that these two aspects are more effective than the frequency of the sound.
Sources: Live Science, Popular Science
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