How Loud Can You Burp?

Extract

'The loudest burp on record is around 105 decibels – louder than a motorbike or chainsaw, and loud enough to cause real pain to anyone close enough to it. But don’t try these at home, as they could be dangerous!

Louder than a motorbike?! No way!

Yup. The world-record burp measured 104.9 decibels (decibels, or dB for short, are the units used to measure volume). And that was from over 2.5m away! Close up, the World Champion burper claims to be able to reach 118dB or more. The average motorbike roars away at around 90dB – a full twenty-eight units lower!

So who did it?

An English guy called Paul Hunn. He smashed the previous burping record in July 2004, and no one has topped it yet.

How could he burp so loud?

Well, like all sounds, burps are just waves of air pressure, and, if you make these waves big enough, any sound can become loud. To create a sound, an object – like a bell or guitar string – is made to vibrate back and forth very fast by striking it, plucking it or rubbing something against it. In turn, the object compresses the air molecules around it, making waves or vibrations that are carried through the air. When they reach your ears, these pressure waves vibrate your eardrums. From there, the vibrations are amplified by a set of little bones, picked up by a set of tiny hairs in your cochlea (which is a long, thin tube filled with fluid and lined with hairs – all coiled up like a snail shell in your inner ear). Here the vibrations are finally translated into nerve signals that your brain interprets as sounds, such as "bell", "guitar string" or whatever.'