Ears are useful for many a thing, but sometimes one really could do without them. There are several sounds that once having penetrated through your eardrum can instil fear, terror, revolt, panic, annoyance or probably violence. Whilst the sound of your husband / wife / colleague / parent / child et al. may well be the final straw for you personally, there are some more general sounds that cause negative emotions in many people.

An oft-cited "worst sound ever" is that of fingernails being dragged down a blackboard. But an experiment set up by Mr Cox of Salford University shows this is far from the truth. It is merely the 16th worst sound from their test-bed of 34 down and dirty annoyances.

A website was set up which randomly played 34 audio files to anyone who cared - more than 1,100,000 voted at the last count - and asked them to judge just how bad a sound was from "Not Horrible" to "Horrible", passing through intermediate stages such as "Really Bad" and "Awful". In fact, it's still up and running if you have a desire to participate.

Results from the mass experiment were recently tallied up, and here for your hearing displeasure are the top 10 most repulsive sounds, the first of which was described by the Guardian as being "the backdrop of market town Britain on a Saturday night". No, unfortunately we're not talking a swift sonata from the Philharmonic Orchestra.

The Poorhouse is more than jubilant to be able to bring you the apparent worst soundfile ever - turn the volume up and click here to hear Europe being shouted into the Great White Telephone.

Sadly the Guardian took it upon themselves to reveal that the sound was not actually the result of one researcher and a keg of cheap Somerfield Super-Strength lager, but rather nothing but an actor with a bucket of "diluted baked beans". Whether such fakery is appropriate in the world of serious science is left up to the reader.

Oh yes, science then. A few of the noise-geeks over the years have tried to establish why exactly it is that as a population we tend to all hate the same types of sounds. Chief reported amongst the scraping-fingers-down-blackboard brigade seems to be the allegation that it is an evolutionary phenomena, the basis for this being that the sound of such a scraping resembles the cry of upset of the warning cries of macaque monkeys - but as the web experimenters say this is rather unproven as of yet.

Regarding the perhaps less overtly irritating but very much more disgusting noises such as belches, farts, inappropriate chewing and of course, the star turn, vomiting, the key theory here appears to be that it's a self-preservationary reaction as the sticky output of other people's bodily excretions could easily contain lots of nasty pathogens and non-Yakult-certified bacteria which would make you ill. And for anyone wondering who the ideal person to keep around to clean up after your messy night out would be, the cold hard science suggests an aged male you are already friendly with would be the least likely to vom-into-own-mouth whilst tidying up your bokery.