What sound makes you want to go postal? It doesn’t need to be loud, it doesn’t need to be shrill, it just has to be a sound that crawls under your skin and needles around until you just want to peel your ears off your head.
For me…well, sorry brachyrhynos, but the sound of a begging baby crow makes me want to pull my hair out. Imagine the normal caw of an adult crow, made whinier and a pitch or two higher, repeated over and over and OVER again right outside, say your bedroom window at Damn It’s Early in the Morning. What gets me is how the pitch rises so feverishly as the crowling’s (or whatever it’s called) parent succombs to the berating whine and actually feeds the damn thing. You can actually hear them caw and choke on their food at the same time. ARGH! It sounds somewhat like this… “Eh! Eh! Eh! EH EH EH EH EH EHHHHHHH EHHHHHHHH EHHHHHHHH! EEEEEEEEHHHHHHHH <muffle gurgle munch> Eh eh.”
:::shudder::: Now we know why some choose to eat their young. UGH.
That screech that fingernails on a chalk board make.
I read somewhere (might have been Straight Dope?) that the reason that particular sound affects humans so is that it is the sound a female ape makes to call her young (or warn them of danger), and that our primate brains retain that from whenever. Be that as it may, that sound causes pain for me.
Irregular vibrations bug the hell out of me. I love white noise, but if the fan or whatever I have producing it starts making clicks, sqeaks or any other non-constant sound it just drives me batty.
A co-worker who sits 4 cubicles away cuts his fingernails at his desk 2-3 times a week. Every clickclickclick makes me grit my teeth and I find I am unable to continue typing until he finishes.
And my grandmother’s voice when she (frequently) calls at 6am on a Saturday.
It’s gotta be Diva’s for me, the way they stretch out one syllable words so that they last 15 seconds really makes me want to slide a butter knife under my knee-cap and pop it open then bring the cap to my mouth and swallow the contents as if it were an oyster.
Really, can anyone stand watching Mariah sing the word “I” while she taps out each change of note in her voice with her finger on an invisible xylophone that is suspended in mid-air without cringing?
The chomp-chomp-chomp of someone chewing gum or eating with their mouth open. I think it is the wet, squishiness of the sound that makes it the most annoying.