A baby cried from row 14 to row 31 of my flight, so somewhere over the drinks trolley, I looked it up. In 2007, two million people voted on the worst sounds in the world, and crying babies came just behind vomiting.
Then I found the other list, where scientists score sounds for pleasantness out of 9. The all-time record holder, at 8.62: a baby laughing. The same tiny person holds both records.
I have not got over this. So I made a museum for the good column: thirty sounds, real recordings, each one measured, with the science of what it does to your brain.
Tap anything. Play it loud.
Britain regulates this feeling by statute.
The ice cream chime you just heard is governed by an actual legal code: twelve seconds maximum per burst, not more than once every two minutes, never before noon, never after 7pm, never near a hospital. Until 2013 the limit was four seconds. Parliament looked at it again and raised it to twelve.
New York went the other way. Since its 2005 noise code fight, a Mister Softee truck may jingle only while moving. The moment it parks, silence.
The bell is the ice cream.
A toaster spring is not music. An ice cream chime is, honestly, a tinny loop. They feel wonderful because of what comes next, and your brain stopped waiting for "next" long ago. In the famous 1997 experiments, dopamine neurons in trained monkeys fired at the cue that predicted the reward, not at the reward itself. Once you know a sound means something good, the sound is enough.
One sound in the wins room uses this wiring against you, on purpose. You will know it when you get there.
Joy comes in two shapes: the pop and the swell.
We measured every recording in this museum: how fast each sound reaches its peak, and how bright it is. They split into two camps. The pops, like champagne and bubble wrap and the doorbell, peak in under a tenth of a second. The swells, like rain and popcorn and a burning fire, take whole seconds to get going. Tap any dot to hear it.
x: time to peak loudness (log) · y: spectral centroid = brightness · measured from these 30 recordings
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The internet never voted on the best sound. Fix that.
The 2007 lot voted on the worst sound and went home without ever running the vote for the best one. So here it is, seventeen years late: two sounds, listen to both, pick the one that sparks more joy. Eight rounds.