According to Wikipedia, that is definitely the source of the him:
Noise and vibration[edit]
In 2011, the Zug Island area was identified by Canadian scientists and Ontario's Ministry of Natural Resources as the source of mysterious rumblings and vibrations that have plagued hundreds of area residents with cyclical vibrations reportedly being felt in the ground up to fifty miles (eighty kilometres) away.[3][4][5]
The city of River Rouge reported in the Star that it cannot afford to spend any more money on investigating the hum. They claim the City Council had already spent over $1 million to help Windsor and Ontario find the source of the noise. However, they say it likely comes from the steel mill facilities on the island.[6]
As of April 2013, a Canadian scientist is using sound-level meters and a portable "pentangular array" of cameras and microphones to try to precisely identify the source of the sound, in order to know whom exactly to ask to fix it.[7]
Another report released on May 23, 2014, confirmed that Zug Island was the source of the hum.[8][9]
[3] Schmidt, Doug (September 21, 2011). "Zug Island likely culprit of Windsor hum". The Windsor Star. Postmedia Network Inc.
[4] "Mysterious noise escalates in Windsor, Ontario". CBC News. January 30, 2012
[5] Ashifa Kassam (June 7, 2016). "The 'Windsor Hum': where is the noise plaguing a city of 210,000 coming from? | World news | The Guardian"
[6] "River Rouge calls off search for Windsor Hum". CBC News. November 7, 2011
[7] Tingley, Kim (June 24, 2013). "The Sound and the Fury". OnEarth.org. NRDC
[8] "Mysterious Windsor Hum traced to Zug Island, Mich". CBC News. May 23, 2014
[9] Colin Novak (May 23, 2014). "Summary of the ‘Windsor Hum Study’ Results"
uuhhh..."Originally a marsh-filled peninsula at the mouth of the River Rouge, it served as an uninhabited Native American burial ground for thousands of years."
In a place like that, there would likely be multiple sources. Such as the three blast furnaces there. Which are among the largest in the world. They blow lots of hot air through lots of extremely hot iron ore, coke and limestone.
Also, does the hum change pitch a lot? With multiple sources at different frequencies, there would likely be beat frequencies. Which could be in constant flux.
Has there been an attempt to trilaterate/triangulate the sound? Should be fairly simple to rig up several recording devices in sync around, and use timing/loudness to get an idea of origin, despite the large wavelength.
Well damn ... Punishment for my ancestors stealing their land and whatnot ... seems fair through that lens ... should make my decent into madness a tad more comforting
The same way some fucked up people train themselves to ignore smoke detector chirps. I've known a couple of these people in my life. They managed to live with a chirping detector for weeks on end and when you bring it up they think you're making mountains out of molehills.
... fascinating. There's no way that's easier than replacing the battery or even the detector itself. Why suffer through something so trivially fixable?
It's only suffering if you're aware of it. We've gone months with several chirping at the same time (due to a different wiring issue) and they are incredibly easy to forget about. We'd only remember when talking on the phone and the other person would ask about the noises.
> Why suffer through something so trivially fixable?
Because, in all likelyhood, they're not suffering at all.
People vary greatly in what causes them discomfort. I imagine the population that doesn't attend to chirping smoke detectors has a strong selection bias for not suffering due to it.
I don't mind carrying reasonably heavy things for miles on foot. I remember one weekend where I had some time to spare and needed to buy a chair, so I jogged about 3 miles to a strip mall, and carried the (boxed) chair back home.
Enough people negatively comment about the weight of laptops that I believe that it matters to some people, but I honestly won't care if my mbp weighed 2 or 3 times as much as it does. I can't understand how laptop weight bothers people without some medical condition, but I also believe them when they say that heavy laptops cause them discomfort.
In retrospect, growing up canoeing for a week every Summer on the Canadian border probably has something to do with it. By the time I was 16, for the longer portages, I'd be the one to take a lighter pack on my back and throw the canoe up on my shoulders. My dad and my brother would carry the heavier packs. Learning to tune out the discomfort of walking up to a bit over a mile over uneven ground through mosquito-infested woods with a 90 lb aluminum 3-man canoe on your shoulders plus a 20 to 30 lb pack probably causes both mental and physical changes that reduce your perception of discomfort from carrying things. There's also survivorship bias, where people inclined to feel discomfort carrying heaving things for distances are likely to not return year after year to canoe areas that require portaging.
Just because you're suffering doesn't mean all people in the same situation feel any discomfort.
With you on the laptop thing, I'm 90-ish kilos and with a good backpack I wouldn't care if it was 2Kg or 6kg, between all the other stuff in there the laptop often isn't the heaviest thing in there.
I find that it's easier to tune out something that is totally periodic and unvarying. As annoying as a smoke detector chirp would be, your brain knows with certainty the timing and sound of it and can process it out completely. A noise that is generally around, but comes and goes and varies in pitch and volume without predictability, can be much more annoying.
My experience is that it’s pretty damn hard. SOMETHING is generating a low frequency hum that I can hear in my bedroom in Seattle; in fact I’m in there’s hearing it right now. It’s been going since somewhere last summer. I hear it every night and it’s still maddening.
When I first moved to Seattle I lived in an apartment in Kirkland and suddenly the hum started. It lasted for months until I moved out and it almost drove me nuts. It was as if it was drilling into my brain at night. Oddly, my wife didn't hear it.
This one started in Summer 2016 and is going 24-7. The only times I've stopped hearing it is when I've gone on vacation; I really need to move. But finding a new place in Seattle is kind of a nightmare right now, and moving to a new city is not without its own complications!
Sorry for this I am not experiencing it so maybe I'm completely wrong but these people seem to be overblowing this a lot. Health effects? I mean, it's a hum. Sure you can't find the source but heaters hum, ACs hum, cars going past hum, bass hums. Like how is it possible that it's this huge of a problem? When a humming stops I tend to actually miss it because it becomes too quiet. I tend to hear the air conditioners or heaters at work all day every day for at least 8 hours. Is this hum much much louder than that or what?
Good for you, but for some of us it will drive you nuts. The quieter it gets as you try to sleep, the louder the hum seems to get. And if you hear it more in one ear than the other, it feels like your head is warping from more pressure on one side than the other. Sure it's "all in your head", and just like with being a little too cold you could theoretically train yourself to ignore it. But that's easier said than done.
Speaking personally, noises that I can locate the source/direction of are easily ignored. Noises that sound the same in multiple locations/appear to be coming from everywhere are _much_ more annoying (I once had a fridge that produced a whine that was right of the cusp of my hearing -- both in volume and frequency -- and I must have spent a good 20 minutes tracking it down because it was impossible to ignore - it sounded the same from anywhere in the room until I got within a few inches of the source). If it's a noise similar to that, I can see it potentially effecting people's sleep and having knock-on health effect.
If it was louder, some may actually find it easier to ignore. I can sleep easily with either a quiet room or with a loud room fan on, but if there's just the fan noise from my NAS I find it much more difficult.
Sigh. I've coded too much this week. My brain just immediately went to: comment out half the city at a time and binary search the source. Guess you can't really do that.
I wonder if the hum persists during a power outage.
"The University of Windsor report said the hum’s likely source was blast furnace operations on Zug Island" ... which is over the border in the United States.
Cutting off the power to that island would be a good thing to try, but apparently the US is uncooperative.
I'd guess amplitude is massively affected by microphone sensitivity. This is not easy to measure and might depend on the direction.
Consider:
* The amount of walls between a mic and the outside.
* The absorbance/reflection of nearby materials, including their shape (flat surface will reflect sounds amplifying certain directions).
* The clutter between the source and receiver. Sound carries over water, not over cities or forests.
* Similarly, elevation of the receiver. Higher means less effect of clutter, and obviously, a hill in between will be an issue.
* Wind direction. Wind will blow the sound away.
It might still work with enough measurements with the same microphone, but that is not a given.
A decent backup plan would be measuring the phase difference. This is still frustrated by wind, but doesn't depend on the senstivity of the microphones.
It does require synchronization of the recordings, which might also be difficult.
It does require synchronization of the recordings, which might also be difficult.
Could you record with a multiple "microphone connected to a Raspberry Pi" setup, with the time synchronized using something like the NIST time signal[1] using an RTL-SDR, or a cellular signal, or GPS, or maybe using NTP?
Yes, that seems like the best approach. At 20Hz waves, ntp would probably be good enough.
The real issue I can see is to get that time-data into the sound data.
Maybe you could time-stamp the beginning of a recording, and start a new recording every minute (to compensate clock drift).
That might work, biggest issue I see is potential variable latency between 'starting a recording' and the actual first recording happening.
It seems like a sensor array across the city of just a few sensors could help detect the source. Using microsecond differences in the arrival of the sound, you could at least tell what direction it is coming from.
You'd have to be able to synchronize the phase of your sensors. If it's a low 30hz hum with very little differentiation between individual cycles you might not have an easy way to do that. You could possibly build a big array with microphones at < 1 wavelength apart so you can observe the waves passing through, dunno.
Also the sound could be reflecting downward from cloud/temp layers, greatly complicating it.
Three people so far have suggested in the comments here it should be "easy" to triangulate it. Note that according to Zug Island's Wikipedia page, "As of April 2013, a Canadian scientist is using sound-level meters and a portable "pentangular array" of cameras and microphones to try to precisely identify the source of the sound, in order to know whom exactly to ask to fix it" and that "the City Council had already spent over $1 million to help Windsor and Ontario find the source of the noise".
I think there's a bit of armchairing going on here, in that people are definitely trying the obvious already.
No tinfoil hat needed. It is very possible for some machine at the steel factory to have foundations in a slab of deeper bedrock that becomes more shallow where the noise is more prevalent. The noise would just come from 'everywhere'
"Since reports of it surfaced in 2011, the hum has been studied by the Canadian government, the University of Western Ontario and the University of Windsor."
Do you really think that between the Canadian government and two universities, over the past seven years, that you are the first person to suggest this "obvious first step"?
I went to school and worked for a while studying spectrum management. It boggles my mind to this day that drones get in the way of fire fighting and emergency services because an obvious first step world be to allow emergency vehicles & helicopters to jam the frequencies of drones. There are plenty of other vehicles with this ability (military, secret service, etc) so it's not like the technology to solve the problem is unobtainable or non existent.
Would that be legal? Does the FCC offer such an exemption to laws prohibiting signal interference? And in what capacity? We've seen law enforcement jam cellular networks, but firefighters and EMTs? Helicopters? Should civilian helicopters also be able to jam signals? Would all this signal jamming (mostly of Wi-Fi bands) interfere with emergency services equipment or the ability of victims to call for help?
Jamming equipment is heavy, bulky, expensive, maintenance intensive, and especially power hungry. Plus due to the vagaries of signal propagation the effects are somewhat unpredictable. Installing jammers on civilian helicopters would be totally impractical.
The problem is that there's an infinite number of possible frequencies. Most Hobby drones use one of the ISM "junk" bands (eg 900MHz, 2.4Ghz, etc), but it's impossible to jam ALL of the possible frequencies without wiping out communications over a wide area.
"Since reports of it surfaced in 2011, the hum has been studied by the Canadian government, the University of Western Ontario and the University of Windsor."
"For the duration of the project, the Hum manifested on only a
handful of days, which made the identification of the source
difficult. Good data representative of the Hum was measured using
the stationed noise monitors. Conclusive evidence of the source
was not achieved using the NSI system since the Hum was not
present on those days that this equipment was deployed on the
river. The conclusion of the research is that the Windsor Hum does
exist and has both qualitative and quantitative characteristics
that surmise the likely source of the Hum to be from the blast
furnace operations on Zug Island."
So the main problem of the article is that it tries to make a mystery from something reasonably good investigated.
Yes there is. At least with frequency assignment. There are very strict policies that any frequency usage within 50 miles of an international border must be approved by the appropriate authority on both sides. The rules may not apply to non-communication based sound (which is an obvious failure), but it's not like there is no framework for this kind of thing, it just doesn't extend far enough.
What I don't understand is if they are just trying to locate sound source or looking for other waves, such as electromagnetic ones. When I walk under high voltage trellises I always hear my head humming.
You don't 'hear' EM waves. What you're hearing near high voltage lines is coronal discharges near the conductors; The field strength is high enough to ionize the air around the conductor causing it to move around, moving air = sound.
Part of the problem is multipath due to reflections caused by buildings, hills, trees, etc. Anytime you listen to thunder or fireworks the rumble persists due to reflections off of such things. It's incredibly difficult to algorithmically remove multipath from terrestrial sources.
It's relatively trivial to find direction of the 30 Hz sound source, given 1 million budget - you just need to place microphones 11 meters apart and raise them above buildings until you get direct line of sight to the main source.
A square block? 5-10 microphones is plenty. Your goal is to find a direction from the place you deploy, not to blanket the city. Then you can redeploy somewhere else to get another direction, etc.
typical triangulation would depend on the sound being heterogeneous in waveform/volume right? If it's a constant hum then you'd only have volume dissipate as you move away which would get a lot harder as sound has different loss functions as it moves through different materials.
No, the triangulation you would use for a project like this would look for time delay or phase lag between 2 (or more) adjacent microphones.
The sound pressure wave is picked up by one, then some few microseconds later, it appears on the other(s) a few centimeters away.
This is pretty straightforward with ordinary sounds that dominate the signal. You could pick out the wire which was struck in a piano, and even the nodes and harmonics along its length.
It gets more difficult at lower frequencies and with quieter signals, which precisely describes this exact situation.
Install time-synchronized sound detectors/recorders in decent distance from each other and measure intensity and propagation of sound spike across time.
Correlate data.
This should provide information about the direction of source.
Further tests in the direction of source would eventually solve the mistery.
Of course "secretive" industrial facilities would likely be the culprit.
“It’s as if you had a fire hose moving back and forth and the people who have the water falling on them hear the noise, and if you’re outside that stream, you don’t hear the noise,”
This suggests overlapping interference patterns from multiple sources
or multiple sound pathways. Is that a reasonable idea for infra-sound?
We had a "hum" sound in cambridge MA. Its one of those sounds when you walk through you don't think anything of it, but if you live near it.... (I was one of the lucky as I couldn't hear it from my bedroom). Incredibly hard to track down, it was determined to be Fans on top of a building. And it was fixed.
The sound bounces around so much, just walking around I couldn't pinpoint it on a couple nights of trying. Its wierd to hear it, but not be able to determine direction. The city figured it out.
We had a similar issue at an apartment block in Australia. The most amusing sight was a bunch of residents, all wandering the corridors trying to find which room was the source, but as in your case it was fans on the roof.
A few years ago they drilled for gas a few kilometers outside the city (about 3 km from my house) — this caused a faint humming noise that seemed to come from everywhere but nowhere in particular. Stand still in a room, hear the noise. Lie down, cover your ears, hear the noise. Put earplugs in, hear the noise. Hugely annoying if you're the kind of person that doesn't sleep well with such nuisances.
Boy was I happy when they were done drilling.
Most interestingly, just a month ago they finished drilling for gas much more closely, right at the edge of the city, not even a kilometer from my house. I didn't hear anything.
My working theory here is that in the former case it was a drilling at a new location, so they must have induced vibrations into the bedrock layers that all the houses here are built on. While in the latter case there was an abandoned operation at the same spot - perhaps they re-used the hole and just drilled it deeper.
> Meaning it's just a rendition of a hum, not an actual recording of "the hum".
...what? Did you not open the link at all? Or are you suggesting they're lying? They literally explicitly say it's an actual recording of the Windsor Hum at 11:12pm on August 24, 2011...
There is nothing to insulate against these large, low frequency waves. They penetrate solid rock. Perhaps enough water could absorb the waves and dissipate them, but that's not really an option.
When doing laser holography the standard practice is to build a large, heavy bed, like a sturdy wooden frame filled with dry sand, and lay that on top of something that absorbs vibrations like a series of tires and inner tubes.
That usually does a good job of sponging up any low-frequency vibrations so long as you don't have any harmonic issues.
If you were battling a persistent hum you'd have to engineer the floors in your house to be floating in this fashion, if not the entire house.
Not sure if commercial headphones would cover the frequency range if it's outside the norm, but Bose et al are great for rhythmic environmental noises.
This is only effective if the microphone and speakers (inverse wave) are where you are... such as on your head. And it depends on the microphone's ability to detect VLF. Even then, the speakers probably don't do well generating 20Hz or lower.
To make it even more challenging, because this is a subtle sensitivity issue, and because most of us don't have identical hearing in both ears, you can't just pipe in the same volume of inverse wave to both ears. It's a really hard problem to solve.
Plus it's not very comfortable trying to sleep with big headphones on; and nighttime is the worst time for this problem.
> perhaps they re-used the hole and just drilled it deeper
So many things could be going on underground (types and shapes of materials) that would make your location affected (or not) based on how the waves travel from each location. Maybe you were just better situated to dodge the waves of the second drill, or something didn't match the same acoustic resonance to be a problem.
Garbage, sensationalist title with mentions of "unknown origin". Even the article says the likely source is Zug island, but of course this wouldn't get as many clicks.
According to the mentioned University of Windsor report (http://www.international.gc.ca/department-ministere/windsor_...) "A previous study confirmed the existence of the low frequency excitation and estimated the source to be in the vicinity of Zug Island". If this article was written with the assumption that the source is likely known, it would have been a reasonable read. Instead, it should have focused on getting the city to do something about it, by approaching the property with a noise complaint warrant, discovering the source, fining those responsible, and changing policy if needed to solve it. If all of the above is impossible for whatever reason, why doesn't the article mention the reasons instead of making it the issue seem like sensasionalist "mystery" news.
Findings from your link, seems you didn't read it.
Number 1 "We do not find common signals at both arrays which could plausibly be associated with the Hum. We are unable to geolocate a definite source for the Hum using common cross-bearings."
Number 5 "The bulk of our observations from both stations do not support the hypothesis that the source of the Hum emanates from Zug Island"
> We note that the bearing from Array 1 to the most probable source of the Hum points well to the South of Zug Island. The bulk of our observations from both stations do not support the hypothesis that the source of the Hum emanates from Zug Island.
Even if it is from Zug Island, "unknown origin" is still appropriate until they know WHAT is causing it.
They have it narrowed down to a few thousand feet. To call it "unknown" is just unfair. They might not know which steel plant is producing it, but they can narrow it down to a small handful, far from "unknown". They have enough evidence of which company is producing the sound (United States Steel), so the only thing stopping them from getting police or lawmakers involved is the fact that no one on the US side cares enough. The article could have mentioned this caveat, but after the couple sentences about the likely cause, it's followed by more "It’s like chasing a ghost" rhetoric.
It's constrained, but it's still unknown. It's not saying there is no clue about the origin, and narrowing it to a few thousand feet/a few possibilities still means the source is unknown.
Different case IMO. There you know both the object and the location to some margin of error. If there was a strange noise in the room, you might know the location to the same degree of precision (i.e. it's somewhere in the room), but until you determine the object making it, the source of the noise is still unknown.
Yes, that's my point. This would be an interesting article if it explored the possibilities and difficulties in solving the problem due to the national border instead of just throwing up its hands and saying "It’s possible that no matter what is done to relieve or attenuate the noise, it might never be enough".
@dang why did you delete the "And no one knows why" from the title? Did it sound clickbaity to you? Seems pretty critical to the article to me. The whole thing is about the search for what the hum is, not what the hum is.
It's a debatable one in this case IMO. "There's a Persistent Hum in Windsor, Ontario, and No One Knows Why" tells me what I need to know -- it's a mysterious hum akin to what I've read about many times, so there's little need to click. "There's a Persistent Hum in Windsor, Ontario" suggests it may be an article about a known cause/why there is a persistent hum, inducing me to click to find out the reason.
A better solution might be to rephrase (e.g. "There's a Persistent Hum of Undetermined Origin in Windsor, Ontario") to avoid the clickbaity style phrasing, rather than just deleting the clause outright, but then you start editorialising which brings its own set of problems.
I'm listening to this right now [1] and (for those of you who don't have a chance to hear it right now) it definitely isn't what I would call a "hum"... that's way too gentle and not bass enough to describe this sound. I'd call it more like low-frequency rumbling (though that's probably not a perfect word for it either).
It's actually a not unpleasant brown noise-like sound. At least that's how it comes out of my hifi. Over bluetooth and after YouTube compression so perhaps high fidelity isn't the right term.
I'm not sure... for me the unfiltered version was annoying but bearable for a bit... but I could see getting driven mad by it after a while. The filtered version was so bad that it almost made me wonder if I'm going to damage my ears, so I stopped listening to it halfway. I was using decent BT headphones so I'm not sure if that makes any difference... it may depend on how decent your speakers are at playing 30-40 Hz.
(Side note: Does BT audio do some kind of lossy compression? Why is it relevant that you mentioned it here?)
Exactly, BT audio uses lossy compression. There are several codecs available but I'm on Linux and the receiver is pretty old so it's probably the weakest of them: SBC.
The filtered sound is pretty bad, yes, dread inducing.
Update: For what it's worth, I just tried it with wired headphones (again, a decent pair) and they don't sound different as far as I can tell, so BT compression doesn't seem to be having any observable effects.
“Does BT audio do some kind of lossy compression?”
Yes. Bluetooth audio is never lossless. Proprietary Bluetooth codecs like Sony LPAC or Qualcomm AptX come close to being lossless, but they’re still lossy.
Listened to the recording (via Bluetooth) on headphones known for their good reproduction of low hertz sound, and the original recording was downright uncomfortable for even a few seconds
I'm wearing over-ear monitors and the rumble is very slightly unsettling in an uncanny way. And that's with all the highpass of the recording. Real life has all that sub 20 Hz that most mics can't pick up. I can see how this could easily drive someone bonkers
So today I learned I’m sensitive to sounds like this. I’ve been hearing stuff like this my whole life when nobody else could. Sometimes I get high pitched noise too. I just thought it was me.
I never have quiet. Even in a hearing test with the headphones on I can hear a loud brown noise. My wife and mom say I have hearing damage but I don’t do terrible on hearing tests. I don’t do great either they just always act like it’s nothing so I don’t know what to think.
I don't buy it at all. The article takes a very strangely sympathetic tone toward the whole situation.
The noise has been narrowed down to one island that has "a few blasting operations". So stop the operations and see if the hum goes away. Then have each one restart one at a time. Or bo binary search, whatever. It doesn't matter.
The obvious takeaway here is that the city/state/province does not care. They are too deep in the pockets of those industries to make any waves at all.
Government has so little power to do anything. They are just the paid legitimizers of the corporations.
It's complicated by the fact that United States Steel is in the US, whereas Windsor is in Canada. It's not just a local government issue, it's an international issue.
Seismologists now have some tricks for locating hum sources. Standard earthquakes have an impulsive start. So with four or more seismograms you can triangulate for the unknowns x, y, z and t0. Hum noises dont have an definitive starting time. But a version of seismology called inferometry can find the origin. You basically cross correlate all pairs of seismograms with signals. The peak lags define a hyperbolic wavefront you can invert for the origin.
This method has been used to find submarines. To look volcanic tremors which have now clear start. And Earth hum which often seems associated with large oceanic storms.
A seismologist would probably deploy seismomters in a wide distribution near the hum area. Then record continuously for about a week. And finally use inferometry to locate the source(s).
302 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadThe leading theories are it has something to do with this mordor like place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zug_Island
Noise and vibration[edit] In 2011, the Zug Island area was identified by Canadian scientists and Ontario's Ministry of Natural Resources as the source of mysterious rumblings and vibrations that have plagued hundreds of area residents with cyclical vibrations reportedly being felt in the ground up to fifty miles (eighty kilometres) away.[3][4][5]
The city of River Rouge reported in the Star that it cannot afford to spend any more money on investigating the hum. They claim the City Council had already spent over $1 million to help Windsor and Ontario find the source of the noise. However, they say it likely comes from the steel mill facilities on the island.[6]
As of April 2013, a Canadian scientist is using sound-level meters and a portable "pentangular array" of cameras and microphones to try to precisely identify the source of the sound, in order to know whom exactly to ask to fix it.[7]
Another report released on May 23, 2014, confirmed that Zug Island was the source of the hum.[8][9]
[3] Schmidt, Doug (September 21, 2011). "Zug Island likely culprit of Windsor hum". The Windsor Star. Postmedia Network Inc. [4] "Mysterious noise escalates in Windsor, Ontario". CBC News. January 30, 2012 [5] Ashifa Kassam (June 7, 2016). "The 'Windsor Hum': where is the noise plaguing a city of 210,000 coming from? | World news | The Guardian" [6] "River Rouge calls off search for Windsor Hum". CBC News. November 7, 2011 [7] Tingley, Kim (June 24, 2013). "The Sound and the Fury". OnEarth.org. NRDC [8] "Mysterious Windsor Hum traced to Zug Island, Mich". CBC News. May 23, 2014 [9] Colin Novak (May 23, 2014). "Summary of the ‘Windsor Hum Study’ Results"
Also, does the hum change pitch a lot? With multiple sources at different frequencies, there would likely be beat frequencies. Which could be in constant flux.
http://www.international.gc.ca/department-ministere/windsor_...
> The bulk of our observations from both stations do not support the hypothesis that the source of the Hum emanates from Zug Island
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zug_Island#Noise_and_vibration
> it served as an uninhabited Native American burial ground for thousands of years
The same way some fucked up people train themselves to ignore smoke detector chirps. I've known a couple of these people in my life. They managed to live with a chirping detector for weeks on end and when you bring it up they think you're making mountains out of molehills.
Because, in all likelyhood, they're not suffering at all.
People vary greatly in what causes them discomfort. I imagine the population that doesn't attend to chirping smoke detectors has a strong selection bias for not suffering due to it.
I don't mind carrying reasonably heavy things for miles on foot. I remember one weekend where I had some time to spare and needed to buy a chair, so I jogged about 3 miles to a strip mall, and carried the (boxed) chair back home.
Enough people negatively comment about the weight of laptops that I believe that it matters to some people, but I honestly won't care if my mbp weighed 2 or 3 times as much as it does. I can't understand how laptop weight bothers people without some medical condition, but I also believe them when they say that heavy laptops cause them discomfort.
In retrospect, growing up canoeing for a week every Summer on the Canadian border probably has something to do with it. By the time I was 16, for the longer portages, I'd be the one to take a lighter pack on my back and throw the canoe up on my shoulders. My dad and my brother would carry the heavier packs. Learning to tune out the discomfort of walking up to a bit over a mile over uneven ground through mosquito-infested woods with a 90 lb aluminum 3-man canoe on your shoulders plus a 20 to 30 lb pack probably causes both mental and physical changes that reduce your perception of discomfort from carrying things. There's also survivorship bias, where people inclined to feel discomfort carrying heaving things for distances are likely to not return year after year to canoe areas that require portaging.
Just because you're suffering doesn't mean all people in the same situation feel any discomfort.
0. http://knkx.org/post/mysterious-hum-keeping-west-seattle-nig...
This one started in Summer 2016 and is going 24-7. The only times I've stopped hearing it is when I've gone on vacation; I really need to move. But finding a new place in Seattle is kind of a nightmare right now, and moving to a new city is not without its own complications!
EDIT: Thanks to ocdtrekkie for digging in further on this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16424617
If it was louder, some may actually find it easier to ignore. I can sleep easily with either a quiet room or with a loud room fan on, but if there's just the fan noise from my NAS I find it much more difficult.
I wonder if the hum persists during a power outage.
I actually think it's the sound of traffic.
Cutting off the power to that island would be a good thing to try, but apparently the US is uncooperative.
Consider:
* The amount of walls between a mic and the outside.
* The absorbance/reflection of nearby materials, including their shape (flat surface will reflect sounds amplifying certain directions).
* The clutter between the source and receiver. Sound carries over water, not over cities or forests.
* Similarly, elevation of the receiver. Higher means less effect of clutter, and obviously, a hill in between will be an issue.
* Wind direction. Wind will blow the sound away.
It might still work with enough measurements with the same microphone, but that is not a given. A decent backup plan would be measuring the phase difference. This is still frustrated by wind, but doesn't depend on the senstivity of the microphones. It does require synchronization of the recordings, which might also be difficult.
Could you record with a multiple "microphone connected to a Raspberry Pi" setup, with the time synchronized using something like the NIST time signal[1] using an RTL-SDR, or a cellular signal, or GPS, or maybe using NTP?
[1]: https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/nist-ra...
And yeah, we're vastly over simplifying. Imagine all the reflections and refractions that an urban center would introduce.
Also the sound could be reflecting downward from cloud/temp layers, greatly complicating it.
Not to say it's not possible, just super tricky.
I think there's a bit of armchairing going on here, in that people are definitely trying the obvious already.
As one of these suggesters - I think it's the problem lies in that the article doesn't mention this obvious first step in determining the source.
Do you really think that between the Canadian government and two universities, over the past seven years, that you are the first person to suggest this "obvious first step"?
"Since reports of it surfaced in 2011, the hum has been studied by the Canadian government, the University of Western Ontario and the University of Windsor."
Those are all the links in the article, the last one (https://www.dropbox.com/s/vi8ek3hqiof81ca/UW%20Study%20Repor...) gives us
"For the duration of the project, the Hum manifested on only a handful of days, which made the identification of the source difficult. Good data representative of the Hum was measured using the stationed noise monitors. Conclusive evidence of the source was not achieved using the NSI system since the Hum was not present on those days that this equipment was deployed on the river. The conclusion of the research is that the Windsor Hum does exist and has both qualitative and quantitative characteristics that surmise the likely source of the Hum to be from the blast furnace operations on Zug Island."
So the main problem of the article is that it tries to make a mystery from something reasonably good investigated.
Cross border noise pollution was likely never envisioned in any international treaties, so there is no obvious legal means to resolve the problem.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/06/28/shotspotte...
Part of the problem is multipath due to reflections caused by buildings, hills, trees, etc. Anytime you listen to thunder or fireworks the rumble persists due to reflections off of such things. It's incredibly difficult to algorithmically remove multipath from terrestrial sources.
The sound pressure wave is picked up by one, then some few microseconds later, it appears on the other(s) a few centimeters away.
This is pretty straightforward with ordinary sounds that dominate the signal. You could pick out the wire which was struck in a piano, and even the nodes and harmonics along its length.
It gets more difficult at lower frequencies and with quieter signals, which precisely describes this exact situation.
This should provide information about the direction of source. Further tests in the direction of source would eventually solve the mistery.
Of course "secretive" industrial facilities would likely be the culprit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum
This suggests overlapping interference patterns from multiple sources or multiple sound pathways. Is that a reasonable idea for infra-sound?
The sound bounces around so much, just walking around I couldn't pinpoint it on a couple nights of trying. Its wierd to hear it, but not be able to determine direction. The city figured it out.
Boy was I happy when they were done drilling.
Most interestingly, just a month ago they finished drilling for gas much more closely, right at the edge of the city, not even a kilometer from my house. I didn't hear anything.
My working theory here is that in the former case it was a drilling at a new location, so they must have induced vibrations into the bedrock layers that all the houses here are built on. While in the latter case there was an abandoned operation at the same spot - perhaps they re-used the hole and just drilled it deeper.
...what? Did you not open the link at all? Or are you suggesting they're lying? They literally explicitly say it's an actual recording of the Windsor Hum at 11:12pm on August 24, 2011...
Seeing the video does not make me less skeptical. I don't know that they're lying, but I do not have great faith in human perception.
One of those sensory deprivation chambers?
Audio insulation?
That usually does a good job of sponging up any low-frequency vibrations so long as you don't have any harmonic issues.
If you were battling a persistent hum you'd have to engineer the floors in your house to be floating in this fashion, if not the entire house.
Not sure if commercial headphones would cover the frequency range if it's outside the norm, but Bose et al are great for rhythmic environmental noises.
To make it even more challenging, because this is a subtle sensitivity issue, and because most of us don't have identical hearing in both ears, you can't just pipe in the same volume of inverse wave to both ears. It's a really hard problem to solve.
Plus it's not very comfortable trying to sleep with big headphones on; and nighttime is the worst time for this problem.
https://www.google.com/search?q=anechoic+chamber&tbm=isch
So many things could be going on underground (types and shapes of materials) that would make your location affected (or not) based on how the waves travel from each location. Maybe you were just better situated to dodge the waves of the second drill, or something didn't match the same acoustic resonance to be a problem.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35344544
https://youtu.be/5WkLoOvm2Yo?t=316
According to the mentioned University of Windsor report (http://www.international.gc.ca/department-ministere/windsor_...) "A previous study confirmed the existence of the low frequency excitation and estimated the source to be in the vicinity of Zug Island". If this article was written with the assumption that the source is likely known, it would have been a reasonable read. Instead, it should have focused on getting the city to do something about it, by approaching the property with a noise complaint warrant, discovering the source, fining those responsible, and changing policy if needed to solve it. If all of the above is impossible for whatever reason, why doesn't the article mention the reasons instead of making it the issue seem like sensasionalist "mystery" news.
Number 1 "We do not find common signals at both arrays which could plausibly be associated with the Hum. We are unable to geolocate a definite source for the Hum using common cross-bearings."
Number 5 "The bulk of our observations from both stations do not support the hypothesis that the source of the Hum emanates from Zug Island"
> We note that the bearing from Array 1 to the most probable source of the Hum points well to the South of Zug Island. The bulk of our observations from both stations do not support the hypothesis that the source of the Hum emanates from Zug Island.
Even if it is from Zug Island, "unknown origin" is still appropriate until they know WHAT is causing it.
I'd say you didn't read the article. They're pretty clear that it's because Zug Island is in the USA while the sound problem affects a city in Canada.
A better solution might be to rephrase (e.g. "There's a Persistent Hum of Undetermined Origin in Windsor, Ontario") to avoid the clickbaity style phrasing, rather than just deleting the clause outright, but then you start editorialising which brings its own set of problems.
(It's better to send questions like this to hn@ycombinator.com, as the site guidelines ask. When you post in the thread, we only see it by chance.)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPDILKQjJW8
(Side note: Does BT audio do some kind of lossy compression? Why is it relevant that you mentioned it here?)
The filtered sound is pretty bad, yes, dread inducing.
Yes. Bluetooth audio is never lossless. Proprietary Bluetooth codecs like Sony LPAC or Qualcomm AptX come close to being lossless, but they’re still lossy.
I never have quiet. Even in a hearing test with the headphones on I can hear a loud brown noise. My wife and mom say I have hearing damage but I don’t do terrible on hearing tests. I don’t do great either they just always act like it’s nothing so I don’t know what to think.
https://www.20k.org/episodes/mystery
The noise has been narrowed down to one island that has "a few blasting operations". So stop the operations and see if the hum goes away. Then have each one restart one at a time. Or bo binary search, whatever. It doesn't matter.
The obvious takeaway here is that the city/state/province does not care. They are too deep in the pockets of those industries to make any waves at all.
Government has so little power to do anything. They are just the paid legitimizers of the corporations.
Another problem:
Zug Island is in Michigan (US).
Windsor is in Ontario (Canada).
A seismologist would probably deploy seismomters in a wide distribution near the hum area. Then record continuously for about a week. And finally use inferometry to locate the source(s).
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/07/seattle-hum-fish-m...