Shrill
About “Shrill”:
Shrillness is the quality of sounds that have a high-pitched, strident, raucous, screeching or harsh character, such as those produced by a trumpet or piccolo. Some such sounds, in a widely recognised and puzzling phenomenon, are perceived as psychologically painful or aversive to a degree that cannot be accounted for simply in terms of frequency content or loudness. Such sounds include the sound of fingernails scraping a chalkboard, the sound of chalk on a blackboard, the sound of glass being scratched, and possibly the sound of a baby crying. There have been attempts to explain the phenomenon, often in terms of frequency content, or evolutionary advantage, but so far no complete explanation or mechanism has been found.
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