Posted19 Sep 2024
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The Hum: A Markedly Real Enigma
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MoreImagine you’re stepping into bed and as you sink into your pillow you notice a sound. At first, it seems like a car revving outside, so you close the window: but the noise persists. Perhaps it’s the AC, the faucet, the TV, the refrigerator, the power grid? All turned off, the noise is somehow louder. Imagine, worse still, that when you tell someone, they don’t believe you. This is the painful reality for hundreds of thousands of people across the globe who hear the hum.
The hum is an auditory phenomenon experienced everywhere from Bristol, United Kingdom, to Taos, New Mexico, but its cause remains largely unknown. Some describe the sound as a car racing toward them but never arriving; for others it’s more like the gurgling of an ultrasound machine. What all share, however, is the inescapability of the sound and the deleterious effects it has on their daily lives. Whether quitting jobs because of the stress or moving home in a bid to escape the clamor, what’s certain is the hum has very real effects.
Conspiracy theories as to the cause of the hum abound—5G towers, military subaudible weaponry, Doomsday prophecies—but Glen MacPherson, creator of The World Hum Map, a website devoted to learning more about the hum, believes the answer is more mundane. MacPherson holds that the hum is an internally generated auditory phenomenon, similar but not equivalent to conditions like tinnitus; you can turn off as many appliances as you like, but the hum drones on inside you. However, without the means to test his hypothesis more rigorously, MacPherson’s theory remains just one of many in a fascinating slew of possibilities.
Even with more evidence to support the internally generated theory, it’s debatable as to whether listeners would be satisfied. MacPherson describes people who hear the hum as feeling special, unique in witnessing the phenomenon. Mystery is more interesting than fact, and the desire to tend toward the fantastical means retaining a sense of magic in what might otherwise be a humdrum life.
Living in mystery, listeners are forever battling against the disbelief of their peers. One possible reason for this disbelief is that the hum is often experienced by middle-aged women, a demographic historically marginalized by the medical community: what if the hum sits in a similar place to illnesses like endometriosis, extremely real for those who suffer it but ignored by the institutions designed to help?
Another is the age-old belief that sound cannot harm us. In what Jonathan Sterne names the audio-visual litany, sounds are understood to be ephemeral, diaphanous, unable to cause lasting damage in the way that more physical forms of harm can. But with sonic forms of torture rife in detention camps across the world, we’d do well to take seriously the harm that sound can cause, mentally and physically.
The hum is an enigma, but one that is markedly real. Amidst the noise of theories surrounding the hum, it is easy to see why, as with The Listeners’ Claire, people could latch onto the charisma and control of someone with answers.
Dr Jacob Mallinson Bird is Lecturer in Music at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities. His first book, on drag lip-sync performance, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2025.
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