Irritate-O-meter

I have just finished making the irritate-O-meter.

This device is simply a measuring tool – like a thermometer – for gauging the level of irritation illicited by certain sounds. The idea is that whenever the Fantastical Reality Radio Show is conducting live interviews or hosting events, we shall bring along the irritate-o-meter and a host of helpfully pre-printed post-it notes for people to position along the gauge, according to their own personal response to a sound and according to where they feel it sits along the scale of irritation.

The scale is made from an old mdf shelf that I have primed with waste paint and then illustrated using permanent markers. A helpful, post-it friendly surface has been created by covering the entire thing in sticky-back plastic and the slightly rough edges have been protected with yellow, fluorescent cloth tape.

Here are the various stages of aural irritation, as identified by me:

Alarming: This is kind of the upper level of irritation where the reaction is almost physical. Many sounds have this effect on me; a physically jarring, alarming sensation. What sounds jangle you?

Annoying… it’a not quite irritating enough to make you angry, but it is kind of getting there.

Irritating. Well, this is the fulcrum, if you like, or mid-point upon which this scale of irritation lies. Irritation itself; similar to the sense of a light, audio rash(but not a really chronic rash; that would be alarming…)

Grating. Not quite irritating, but still causing enough discomfort to register as unpleasing. Grating noises generally have the potential, long-term, to deplete your reserves of tolerance, but they are unlikely to actually irritate you.

Mildly diverting. Now this is a bit of a controversial category of irritation because it could also cover noises that are actually intriguing or pleasant in some way as well as denoting extremely mild audio irritants.

Barely noticeable. This is, obviously, the most slight level of irritation possible. You know the sound is there, and it could potentially be irritating… but since you have to strain to think about it and can easily shut it out, it counts as being barely noticeable.

Once it has been adorned with post-it notes, this is how our irritate-O-meter appears:

I was asked recently if I thought it was a little bit negative to focus on the noises people find irritating rather than the sounds people like or find pleasant, which is a really good question.

I have thought about it and ultimately reckon that projects which fail to acknowledge the sometimes traumatically noisy world that we live in are potentially not as affirmative in nature as projects which celebrate things as they are. Many people don’t think about the sounds of ordinary life, I believe, because there are so MANY sounds, and they are sometimes very invasive or unpleasant. I think it’s important to face that truthfully rather than evade it. And I don’t think it’s negative; it’s basic science. You only have to look at graphs which show the resonances at which the eardrum is actually damaged and then analyse the waveforms that cars, machinery, audio equipment etc. produce to see that yep, we live in a world that is – at times – painfully noisy.

But surely we can have fun with that idea, too?

So rather than skip over the inconvenient problem of ‘negativity,’ I wanted to see if there was a way of engaging – in a positive way – with the way we feel and think about these sounds we find irritating. I hope that in considering where to place a sound along the scale of irritation, some new thoughts concerning the nature of everyday sound will occur and I hope the top twenty chart of irritating noises I’m working on for The Fantastical Reality Radio Show will genuinely invite opinions and contributions from people like you.

If you feel I have missed some crucially important irritating sounds from my poll please do say in the comments box and I’ll try to record them for the show and if you know of an incredibly irritating sound that is perhaps rare on unusual, tell me where it is and I might just go a-hunting with my recorder.

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