Recent study shows thunderstorm to be the world’s most soothing sound, ahead of birds chirping and cats purring

With winter officially upon us, you’ll surely be hearing the pitter-patter of rain outside your window – either that, or lashings of it, depending on what vengeance climate change has in store for you.

Whether gentle or hard, rainfall has recently been found to be the second most soothing sound to the human ear, following, believe it or not, the sound of thunder.

In a study by UK company HAYPP (and a British firm would know a thing or two about the weather), the sound of thunderstorm is calming to more people than the sounds of cats purring, crickets chirping or leaves rustling in the wind.

A seed list of the most popular soothing sounds was compiled through a variety of reputable articles. The study then involved trawling through YouTube to discover the amount of views for each of the sounds by using the search variation, eg: ‘thunderstorm sound’. You know when you’re searching YouTube for some lovely chakra background sounds, or audio of gentle rain falling? That’s the sort of searches researchers looked into.

All sounds were then ranked in descending order, based on the amount of views accumulated to reveal the ones most listened to.

Four out of the top five soothing sounds are water sounds, and coming out on top was ‘thunderstorm’ which is considered a typical example of ‘white noise’ – that is, a mix of frequencies allowing a person to drown out any noises that might be found disturbing. This particular sound garners over 409 million YouTube views.

Following closely behind, with 399 million YouTube views is rainfall. Soft rain sounds are an example of ‘green noise’ – a constant mid-level frequency creating a flat and steady sound.

Rustling leaves rank at the bottom of the list, with 3,026,000 YouTube views (over 405 million less than thunderstorm sounds).

Some sounds have a specific benefit to the anatomy, for example, watching fire on a screen (eg: a fake log fire) accompanied by crackling fire sounds can actually help reduce blood pressure.

Other officially natural sounds that do a great job at calming and soothing are birds singing, running streams, ocean waves, crickets chirping and, very surprising to us, city noise! Yep, ‘city atmosphere’ ranks number 9 in the list, even beating that glorious sound of a cat purring.

See the full list, below.

Lisa Andrews & Antonino Tati

WORLD’S MOST SOOTHING SOUNDS, RANKED:

THE POP SHOP