Cecil’s latest: What’s so awful about nails on a chalkboard? - The Straight Dope
Couldn’t help but be reminded of this scene from The Pink Panther Strikes Again: Gauntlets on Chalk-Board, The Pink Panther Strikes Back, Herbert Lom - YouTube
The column has a lot to say about what sort of noise triggers the averse response, but doesn’t answer the question why. Luckily I know the answer.
Noises like this stimulate a tactile sensation centered on the teeth. Imagine scraping your front teeth by dragging a dry piece of slate over them, back to front. Sets your teeth on edge (as the expression goes), no? You not only feel the unpleasant, abrasive, tooth-damaging sensation of it, but the sound, amplified by bone conduction, is loud and distinctively ugly, setting up an instant negative association that, once experienced, you don’t forget.
Perhaps as a teething infant you tried to bite a pebble or piece of iron or something hard and inedible like that. You’d quickly learn not to do it again. Your choppers need to be preserved, and the nails-on-a-blackboard sound prompts a sensory reminder of that.
That’s interesting. Nails on a chalkboard has never bothered me at all, but I have a similar reaction when I bite on thick fabric, say a wool pullover. So, teeth again. On the other hand, I also get that feeling when my nails get caught in carpet.
Chalkboards and styrofoam never bothered me. Metal utensils on metal cookware? AAAAH!
I agree. Fingernails on a chalkboard never bothered me at all, and I wondered if it was originally carpenter’s nails that were so offensive, and somehow, it got transferred when carpenter’s nails stopped being things people had around the house. People continued to react because they were told it was annoying.
But yeah, biting wool is a really annoying sensation. I always thought that the combination of a taco or burrito in two different tortillas with different textures would be annoying as hell, too. Never ordered it, though.
The part I’m wondering about is that he describes 2000-4000 Hz as being “right in the middle of the range of human speech”. That’s 2-3 octaves above middle C. Now, granted, that’s not an unheard-of range for human speech, but we’re talking about operatic sopranos, here.
300Hz to 3400Hz is the tradition range for telephony.