Misophonia

I've just discovered I have Misophonia It's pretty common, I'm relieved to know; supposedly something like 1 in 5 have it, so I guess many members of DIYAudio might also suffer this ailment. To save you looking the word up to find out what it means, it is the hate or disgust of certain sounds, especially eating noises. It was triggered again yesterday so I did some Googling on it and pleased to find out I'm not the only one. I was also thinking that our passion of loving music and purity of sound could even mean we have a bigger proportion than average. I list the ones that make me explode with anger and makes me want to scream SHUT that ****ing noise. I find it hard to really give them any order of intensity of the annoyance ...They really are nearly all the same to me. So, I start with the most recent one:
1) People scraping out plastic/paper yogurt pots when they're nearly empty. That little tap-tapping sound as they search around and around with the spoon, looking for the very last molecule of it, makes me go nuts!
2) People who have transistor radios on at work in the office, on the beach or a neighbour in the garden, nearly all are tuned to utter modern pathetic crap pop music. It's even worse when I can only just hear it too. Maybe if it was blaring out loudly, I could stand it more? ...Hmmmm maybe not!
3) People whispering on TV or radio ads or films. That breathy-over-loud- unnatural sound makes me want to scream. You know the type.... you can actually hear the lips moving...UGGGGH!
4) More commonly, people who smack their lips when they eat, I guess this must be very common with people.
5). Oh yes, just thought of another one....In the UK it has now become trendy to miss out the letter T when pronouncing any word that contains it midway in the word... This insults me so much in that the utter, shear, low-life, ignorance of the person speaking has actually entered my brain via my ears!

Anyway, I would love to know what other sounds get people angry to the point of rage. It could be quite funny, I think.
 
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Judging by the symptoms you describe, I must have misophonia too; but I suspect it's an age thing. Do people at work with valve radios tuned to R3 or R4 upset you? No, I thought not. How about electronics that goes "Beep" each time you press a button?

If you go looking for medical issues, you quickly discover you have everything from fallen arches to Lassa fever. I am told I have astonishingly flat feet; but they seem fine to me (took me for a seven mile walk this morning). Don't know about the Lassa fever, though.
 
Listening to reggae music without any BASS, mon!

From a long time ago on a work crew - the pathetic high-pitched “dink-chink, dink-chink, dink-chink” barely audible from down the hall….. out of a little pink 4-double-A boom box with 3” speakers. Made me want to SMASH SOMETHING. And inspired the creation of a plywood “box” out of a cassette deck sawed off of a 3-in-one stereo, a 32 watt per channel amp and two 8” high-sensitivity full rangers. Rush, AC/DC, BOC and Boston replaced the previous “selections”. Then they complained they couldn’t hear their cute little box over our racket. Management moved us to another floor.


The current pet peeve is the sound of the dog constantly licking the floor trying to chase down a molecule or two of people food. I can’t imagine the dirt tasting good enough to justify it but that doesn’t stop him from trying.
 
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I have it too!!!

My wife has a what I call a cathedral palate/roof of mouth. i.e very high. When she eats an apple it sounds like she is breakimg a hard polystrene box with her mouth. and chewing it. I have never heard anyone else make such a racket. When finishing a bag of crisps just like a child she will seek out the small bits at the bottom of the bag with her fingers and despite my saying she eats like a 5 year old and to shake the bits into one palm and then eat them she refuses to do so.

I was told by my mother that constantly sniffing was for "Guttersnipes" but despite this she seems to have in the last few years developed a "Tic". At times it is repeated every second and drives me to distraction. If I tell her to blow her nose she says that there is nothing to blow.....welll then why are you sniffing.

Other noises that irritate me are the "Vocal Fry" brigade which seems to be an epidemic amongst teens and 20/30s or anyone wishing to inflience the lives of others particularly "influencers" and their ilk. My wife does in fact get really irritated too.

There are many other noises made by people that I deem uneccesary or affected or have a "cult" following (glottal stop merchants) who think it is cool to drop Ts or Gs or speak "Street".

I think I will stop here 🙂
 
From a long time ago on a work crew - the pathetic high-pitched “dink-chink, dink-chink, dink-chink” barely audible from down the hall….. out of a little pink 4-double-A boom box with 3” speakers. Made me want to SMASH SOMETHING. And inspired the creation of a plywood “box” out of a cassette deck sawed off of a 3-in-one stereo, a 32 watt per channel amp and two 8” high-sensitivity full rangers. Rush, AC/DC, BOC and Boston replaced the previous “selections”. Then they complained they couldn’t hear their cute little box over our racket. Management moved us to another floor.
The kid next door when I lived in Florida used to climb up in a tree in his front yard and crank some death metal noise just loud enough to irritate. I connected the 400 WPC Carver to a pair of 4 X 12 inch guitar cabinets pointed out the front windows, dimed the volume and cranked up some real rock so loud that he could not hear his own boom box. He eventually moved to a tree in the back yard where I could not hear it.

He started a death metal band called Sickness and had band practices in the back yard. My daughter played the drums and had a full cage setup. She played in the high school band and had lots of band geek friends with musical weapons. This evolved into a different kind of "loudness war" that involved the entire block! Eventually a truce was declared, and guaranteed when I got him a job at Motorola.

How about the over-abuse of Autotune, to the point where every singer’s voice sounds the same, sounds-like-her-voice-is-be-ing-played-back-on-a-key-bored…..
Or Cher's deliberate misuse of autotune to make those annoying humanly impossible sounds.
 
I can't understand the getting angry thing but do find the screeching sounds of electric guitars and screeching vocals not musical and fairly annoying. Most of the Wailers content is not welcome in my playlists, plus things like Peter Tosh's screeching guitar in Johnny Be Good
 
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I attended a meeting in a shopping mall food court today, a basic pow-wow session over coffee in a busy place. At one point there was this distant alarm sounding a constant drone. A high pitch with distortion held steady. It pulled me right out of the conversation at hand. Nobody else noticed until I pointed it out to them. Like they could not hear that disturbing frequency running nonstop until I made note of it. The other people could just barely hear the noise but to me it was disturbing, distracting and annoying. It stopped after two or three minutes.
 
It's a real and terrible thing if you suffer from it, like me too. And I hate having it. But it's not something you can just unlearn, ignore or shake off. Once you are aware of this condition and that you are sensitive to it - it becomes worse. It's especially disturbing if family members are the cause around the dinner table and you cannot just up and leave. You end up trying to endure, or mask the sounds with other loud noises while swearing silently in your mind, like sonicles said. Sounds that trigger me are chewing and swallowing noises of anybody around me, including my wife. Some people just make more disturbing noises when eating than others. Wish I did not have this condition and I guess people who don't have it just cannot comprehend how upsetting and disturbing such a seemingly stupid thing can be.
Thanks for sharing sonicles.
 
One of my nephews here in Japan suffers from this ailment. For him it is the sniffing sound. Anger is socially unacceptable, so his manifests as anxiety/panic and stomach issues instead. Noise cancelling devices and medication enable him to remain enrolled and successful at uni.

Such a nice kid. I feel bad for him.
 
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