An man has broken a 30 odd year Guinness world record for the loudest ever shout.
58 year old, Joseph McGrail-Bateup, from Australia yelled the word "now", which was recorded at an ear splitting 122.4 decibels. He beat the previous record which was held by Northern Ireland teacher, Annalisa Flanagan, who yelled the word "quiet" at 121.7 decibels in 1994.
To put this into context, Mr McGrail-Bateup's shout is at the same level of a clap of thunder, pneumatic drill, or a chainsaw. It was recorded by a professional acoustic engineer in front of witnesses, before being confirmed by Guinness on Friday.
Reports shared in Sky News, said that Mr McGrail-Bateup told reporters including CNN, that he had experimented with different words, before settling on the word "now", which he duly belted out at a radio studio in May.
He also revealed that he took seven attempts to break the record, and admitted that his voice was "shot" in the days which followed.
"There's no way that you can actually practise for it," he said. "You have to just keep it for the day, especially with the world record attempt".
Sound uses a logarithmic scale and is not linear in progression: The subjective loudness doubles after every increase of 10db. The RNID say that most people experience pain when shouting at 130 decibels (about the level of a jet taking off 100m away).
Mr McGrail-Bateup is an air conditioning cleaner and honorary town crier for Carberra. He became town crier in 2017, and also makes announcements at local events, which he calls a "bit of fun".
Prior to this, Mr McGrail-Bateup had set another record when he shot 10 archery arrows in 60.03 seconds in 2019. His record was broken by a seven year old boy by over 11 seconds, nine months later.
