If it quacks like a duck … will a car horn be less annoying?

At the risk of sounding like Michael Gove, I think the problem with experts is that they don’t agree. Researchers in Seoul, having tested various car noises on 100 volunteers, have found that horns would suit us all much better if they sounded like ducks – still managing to alert people while being less irritating. However, Mike Stigwood, a consultant with noise-pollution specialist MAS Environmental, couldn’t disagree more. “No, absolutely not. You need a noise that triggers the sense in an alarming way and immediately draws your attention – which is what sirens and car horns currently do.” A quack is not that noise, except possibly to ducks.

The thing we hear is the intention beneath the noise, and intentionality governs response. It is also the difference between what you are acclimatised to and what you become hypersensitive to. “Someone moving from the countryside to live next to a motorway will have acclimatised to the traffic noise within a month,” Stigwood says. “Whereas if your neighbour has a rock-band rehearsal twice a week, you will get to the point where even the cars pulling up on the driveway will trigger adverse emotion.”

In the UK, unlike in Paris or Rome, we tend to sound our horns when we’re irritated with a specific person, and not just when we’re annoyed at the traffic. I spent some years reviewing cars, driving a different one every week, and almost never knew where the horn was. This resulted in either random honking (I had a Lexus once, in which my son, leaning back to punch my daughter, accidentally sounded the horn, put me in sports mode and turned on the windscreen wipers) or not being able to honk at all, whereupon I had to make do with obscene gestures.

Some observations on horn use, in no particular order: it’s almost never an emergency, and almost always an aural expletive; everybody in your vicinity, including pedestrians, thinks you mean them; violent hand signals are, oddly, a lot less aggressive, and people usually end up laughing; if you were to limit horn use to situations of real and present danger, you would probably do it no more than once a year.

My considered adjudication, therefore, is to have two sounds: a horn for genuine danger that you almost never use, and a quack for swearing at people, which will release your rage but take the heat out of your rudeness.