Ya this seems like hyperbole. I clicked on it thinking it was that annoying sound from older TVs when they are just 'on' but nothing is play [no static, etc].
I'm not sure why you're so hostile to this. Perhaps I'm just misreading your words.
Various "mysterious" noises are heard across the workd and cause problems for inhabitants. The noises are mysterious because it can be hard to work out what is causing the noise.
Noise is used as a tool by torturers. Tinnitus can sometimes lead people to attempt suicide. It seems fair to suggest that an unstopping unexplained noise can cause extreme distress. I dislike the wording "driving people insane" because I work in de-stigmatising MH problems, but the meaning is clear.
Here's an example of a mysterious noise from England.
I'd be interested to know what happens if they build a chamber that is provably isolated from "The Hum" and put sufferers inside it. Do those people still experience it? Even better if there's some kind of double blind way of isolating / not isolating the chamber from the Hum.
I think we can all agree on what you said. But I will not agree that there is one universal, external common cause for all these things, an elusive mystery. But this is what the article claims.
My take away from the article is "environmental pollution is no fun": Noise pollution, particularly low frequencies that travel huge distances and through most materials, can be infuriating, especially if other people aren't as sensitive to it, making you seem overly sensitive.
I can actually appreciate that it could test people's sanity over long periods of time.
That part seems obvious and a given. The whole bit about radio waves... The article tries to bridge the two by claiming that the suspect furnace near Windsor is producing "VLF waves" (maybe they're adopting it to audio frequency, but given the other parts it seems like they're trying to bridge the radio thing), only it's actually creating low frequency acoustic waves, measured seismically. Just normal noise, carrying enormous distances and irritating people. Just as irritating as the guy in the Honda Civic with the giant subs playing rap music.
That map looks just like a population map of the USA and UK, plus assorted English speakers from western Europe. Combined with the fact that the sound seems to grow stronger indoors, I think the source is inside their own heads. Not in the sense that they're crazy, though. Maybe as people get older and their inner ear changes slightly, the signals that are being sent when everything is silent also change, but the brain doesn't. So they interpret the "silent" signal as "the hum".
My first test would be stuffing their ears and putting them in a perfectly isolated acoustic chamber to see if they still hear it. I'm pretty sure they would.
Yes, exactly. Every time I see one of these I wish they would plot the per-capita occurrences as a heat-map instead, which would actually be useful. (A bit more work sure, but certainly doable.)
Those are neat, but from what I can tell a cartogram is something different from what I'm describing. From wikipedia: "A cartogram is a map in which some thematic mapping variable – such as travel time, population, or Gross National Product – is substituted for land area or distance." So they're basically distorted maps, where the distortions are proportional to a variable.
(It might help to include some explanation in your comment.)
Yeah, the most common cartogram in those pictures is population.
Therefore, each pixel of the cartogram contains an equal number of people in it.
If you bin your heatmap into pixels with equal number of people in them, then HOT regions in the final image will correspond not merely to the number of people who live in an area (like in the xkcd), but to the percentage of a constant number of people.
You can still recognize the underlying geography, because the population density isn't CRAZY skewed.
Here are some well-documented cartograms that give you a feel for what they can do:
My own idea is to divide the amount of hum sufferers with the amount of population of the place, and THEN make a heatmap...
Maybe you need to cull places where there are too few people and 1 hum sufferer might already cause lots of heat, but I expect the result would be a proper amount of hum sufferers compared to total population of the place, maybe this way you can trace sources of those hums.
Also I bet lots of people don't talk about this publicy, because people say they are crazy or the sound is inside their head, I mentioned a high-frequency buzzing sound I hear on my apartment, and people already threw lots of disparaging and senseless remarks to me (even with me being very explicit that the sound comes from outside, because I cannot hear it when I close my windows or go to window-less rooms)
My thought was: they draw a map like this, if thats any indication of there ability to scientific/rational thinking, no wonder they never find the origin of (their particular) Hum.
Also if you ask the internet if they too, see a pink elephant on the moon every 2th full moon, theres going to be a lot of responses telling you that they too, see a pink elephant on the moon every 2th full moon.
No, the transmitters are extremely powerful. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLF_Transmitter_Cutler says it was at some point the world's most powerful radio transmitter at 1.8MW. Actual field strength will of course depend in a complicated way on distance from the site and the propagation, but you'd think that if these sites were the source, there should be a strong concentration of cases around the transmitters.
It's not clear to me why it's not straightforward to test these hypotheses. There are apparently plenty of hum sufferers out there, and it sounds like many would be happy to help with any testing that might isolate the source. There are also plenty of anechoic chambers and Faraday cages available. Seems like it would be relatively easy to test the two prevalent theories. You may not be able to pinpoint the exact source, but you could at least tell whether the hum in a given region was acoustic or electromagnetic in origin.
I wonder if you could get subjects who travel a lot to record, before going to sleep each night, in a secret journal they do not share with each other, about whether or not they experience a hum in any given location. If those journals substantially agreed, you might be able to get a clearer picture of what, if anything, is going on.
If there is any sort of community built around a potentially hard to observe phenomenon, it's likely going to be a mess sorting out true stuff from false stuff.
Why not just make a web site for this? If this really affects 2%-10% of the population, then it should be pretty easy to determine if the source is internal or external with enough data.
Maybe the mysterious noise is from one's own living body, like what you hear when you put your fingers in your ears.
In 1951, Cage visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard
University... "I heard two sounds, one high and one low.
When I described them to the engineer in charge, he
informed me that the high one was my nervous system in
operation, the low one my blood in circulation." Cage had
gone to a place where he expected total silence, and yet
heard sound.
The author follows the intro to that topic (which says nothing about EM waves causing 'sound' I might add) by saying:
Finally, there's a body of empirical evidence that makes this theory more appealing. A study funded by the Canadian government and led by University of Windsor mechanical engineering professor Dr. Colin Novak spent the last year listening to the "Windsor Hum" that's been torturing residents in the Windsor area of Ontario since 2011.
If you read the intro to that paper, it's very clear that it was acoustical noise that was measured and likely to be caused by a blast furnace. So that study provides no evidence at all that EM waves are causing 'noise'.
The author continues with:
The study concluded that not only does the Windsor Hum actually exist, but its likely source was a blast furnace at the U.S. Steel plant on Zug Island, which reportedly generates a high volume of VLF waves during its hours of operation.
The study did not find that the blast furnace was radiating VLF waves (VLF being a term limited to EM waves) but rather that it was emitting sound waves in the 30-35Hz range. 30-35Hz is the SLF EM range, so even if the author conflated the types of 'waves', I'm not sure where they got VLF from.
And then:
Dr. Novak's study caps off decades of Hum theories
No, it really doesn't, it just found a loud blast furnace. Not to take anything away from the work needed, locating a sound source at frequencies that low in a complex environment isn't trivial.
I'd love to know the process by which they think a 30khz radio wave could induce a current in your nervous system that you would perceive as a low frequency sound. The whole piece seems technically illiterate.
It doesn't seem entirely implausible. Your body can act as an antenna, and nerves are sensitive to electrical currents, and the frequency range is right. It's a question of what the induced current would be and how sensitive the nerves are.
The top end of the range they are quoting for the radio waves (30khz) is above the top of human hearing (20hz - 20khz), and besides the wavelength is far too long (10000m), for any of your nerves to be acting as antennae. A centimeter, or millimeter scale wave might do something to a nerve, but a 10,000 meter one seems unlikely to.
I find it highly unlikely too, but I think your math is a bit off. You don't need to excite a single nerve, but the entire system. I don't know anything about physiology, but I wouldn't be surprised to be told that there are 10km worth of electrically interconnected 'wires' in our body. If there are, then it wouldn't be outrageous to hypothesis that it could 'pick up' EM radiation at such frequencies. Whether it's enough to matter, I highly doubt, but it doesn't seem completely out of the ballpark.
The article was really hard for me to read, because the author just thinks so much differently from me. i.e. if an area is driving you mad, do you get instant relief if you leave the area?
It could still be chemical / something in the air that makes you hallucinate, but not talking about such basic questions is just so different from how I think.
the next most basic question is whether there are actually any physical sounds at any frequency - if microphones aren't sensitive enough at certain frequencies to tell us, then I would lead with that. If they're sensitive enough, but show nothing, then I would lead with that and then show a differential as to why it's not psychosomatic, or a chemical poison that gives you this effect, etc.
I just found this article too different from how I think to read through.
>The article was really hard for me to read, because the author just thinks so much differently from me. i.e. if an area is driving you mad, do you get instant relief if you leave the area? It could still be chemical / something in the air that makes you hallucinate, but not talking about such basic questions is just so different from how I think.
I asked that too, but some people like/love their cities, houses, relatives and friends and jobs. They don't just move on the first issue that happens.
While living in the city of Groningen, the Netherlands I experienced a Hum during some nights (I doubt that there is such a thing as the Hum - there's too many possible sources for low-frequency sounds). I have not had that issue before or after. However, in my case the most likely case is easy to pinpoint: the control centre for the Groningen gas field[0] was just a few blocks away from where I lived, and I expect that if they open or close a valve, that can cause some low-frequency whistling sounds that propagate through the ground.
As I get older, I hear some sounds I am certain are like tinnitus. It terrifies me because I love and need quiet. But so far I've been able to move around, create some other sounds, and the fake sound stops. But tinnitus is a disease of old age.
That was my first thought too. I've got permanent tinnitus even though I'm in my mid-twenties (brought on due to headphone abuse when I was a teenager). It sounds more like a high-pitched tweee sound than a hum, but I've heard different people hear different sounds.
Sorta OT, but I've actually been able to get some use out of my tinnitus. If there's background noise that's preventing me from falling asleep (but nothing too loud), I can purposefully focus on the sound of my tinnitus. It becomes more prominent and effectively drowns out the sound that keeps me awake.
I relate to the paradoxical utility of the tinnitus sound. For sleeping and meditation! it's like a never ending chant you can focus back whenever.
I've also tried to use the hum as reference point to get perfect pitch earing, that is been able to tell if a note is a C, a F or whatever. Unfortunatly my tinnitus seems to be composed of several frequencies and out of tune. I can't make any use of it for musical purposes (yet).
I have the opposite problem. When I was young, I could hear all sorts of hums and whines (including one which came from a nearby Ford factory). But headphones and loud rock shows seemed have killed my low-end hearing.
I have suffered tinnitus on and off since my late teens. It became permanent around 4 years ago. I don't think this phenomena is related - if you have tinnitus you know you have it.
How do you know you have it? I've had a particular high pitched sound in my head that's apparent as soon as the ambient sound in the room goes down to a certain threshold. It's been that way for as long as I can remember, and I'd just assumed it was that way for everyone. Is that not the case? What should absence of sound in a room sound like to a normal observer?
Any sound you hear in the absence of actual sound is by definition tinnitus, as far as I understand. Once would expect an absence of sound to sound like nothing, no?
I don't know. I've never heard anything different from what I hear now in the absence of sound, nor have I thought to question the normalcy of what I hear until now. Without a reference point, I cannot make a comparison.
Been strict you can't know for sure. Birth deaf people probably suffer strong tinnitus for their lifes without realizing. Oliver Sacks has nice essays extending on this.
But if tinnitus comes during your lifetime you do have a reference point, and you will most likely notice.
well, a "high pitched sound in my head that's apparent as soon as the ambient sound in the room goes down" is pretty much THE informal definition of tinnitus. You may not have it, but I'd bet you do.
P.S. I have it, from being young and dumb and into punk rock and having a walkman.
A bit off-topic, but there are indications that tinnitus may be relieved by treatment of myofascial trigger points in the jaw muscles (e.g. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17956784).
I have mild tinnitus and my self-experiments have been inconclusive - in some instances kneading my masseter and the other, minor, jaw muscles has seemed to give relief, but nothing obvious.
Incidentally, I also sometimes experience another form of "tinnitus" (not sure what to call it) that manifests itself as a swooshing sound when I move my eyeballs quickly. It's most noticeable if I'm tired or under the weather in some form. I'm curious if anyone else has experienced something similiar?
I lost earing on my left ear 3 years ago, around my 30s. Normal audition was replaced by permanent tinnitus. Talking to other affected people, old and young, i can tell that mine is the strong side of the spectrum.
I don't suffer the severe symptoms decribed in the article. I think that Hum must be doing something else to the bodys of those affected.
My tinnitus, after some weeks of adaptation, became part of normal life. I can sleep, concentrate and so on. I do miss the old silence sometimes. Good music is the new silence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum#Tinnitus
"People who both suffer from tinnitus and hear the Hum describe them as qualitatively different, and many hum sufferers can find locations where they do not hear the hum at all. An investigation by a team of scientists in Taos dismissed the possibility that the Hum was tinnitus as highly unlikely."
This is pretty interesting because I've been hearing a low-frequency hum for the last few years -- since moving into my current home. I only notice it at night, lying in bed when it is quiet. To me, it sounds like an idling car sitting within a few hundred feet of my house. At first, I suspected cops were sitting near my house (on a corner, near a stop sign) waiting for people to run the stop sign, but I never found any idling cars when I went to investigate. Fortunately I'm not bothered by it.
Freezer, airco or refrigerator. Probably contact sound from a pump or compressor in one of those. Don't be surprised if it ends up being very far away from where you're located, sound waves travel very well through solids.
I've experienced this. It's not tinnitus which is high pitched - this is low pitched. I could hear it best in a certain room, but not when I stuck my head out the window. It occurred over a period when the nearby overground tube line was being worked on. So I concluded it's industrial machinery causing low frequency vibrations which reverberate in certain acoustic configurations. And it's very, very annoying.
This is a very important point. Low frequency noises can have a wavelength exactly the size of common rooms, yielding an unbearable amplification as the waves gang up with common peaks and troughs.
I don't understand why this is such a big problem.
1) Locate someone suffering from the hum.
2) Take expensive pressure and sound equipment to their location.
3) Record all observable frequencies.
4) a) If nothing shows up, it's a personal biological problem. Direct problem toward medical professionals b) If something shows up on the frequency graph, identify the direction the sound is coming from (again using equipment that, you know, has been designed for this kind of thing and has been around for ages).
This caused issues in locating the Windsor hum, as mentioned in the article. It seems like it should be extremely easy to put up a couple of mics and narrow it down, but it ended up being a significant technical challenge involving a number of seismic detectors. Low frequency noise is a bitch.
I know you're not supposed to post about this, but I'm kind of curious if there is a particular user on HN that seems to have a grudge against my posts? Until recently, I have never gotten downvotes, and now it seems that I consistently get one on everything I post. The tone and style of my posts has not changed over the past year, so if I have somehow upset some user who is now revenge downvoting, I apologize.
After reading this article I started to pay attention to all background noises and currently can not to sleep because of some strange rhythmic series of tone bursts.
>"It completely drains energy, causing stress and loss of sleep," a sufferer told a British newspaper in 1992. "I have been on tranquilizers and have lost count of the number of nights I have spent holding my head in my hands, crying and crying."
Yeah, if it gets that bad, how about ...well, MOVING elsewhere?
Maybe some people begin to sub/consciously listen for their phone to buzz, vibrate or make a sound and notice the noise of air, static noise, computer fan hums, blood traveling inner ear?
Their utilities run @ 50hz. Maybe there's a conflict with older and newer products manufactured from other countries?
69 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadthat can't even be isolated or really called a "sound," since reports differ so greatly
Is Driving People Insane
the article itself does not make or substantiate this claim
Nobody Knows What's Causing It
because "it" may or may not be a new thing, a single thing, or even a thing
Various "mysterious" noises are heard across the workd and cause problems for inhabitants. The noises are mysterious because it can be hard to work out what is causing the noise.
Noise is used as a tool by torturers. Tinnitus can sometimes lead people to attempt suicide. It seems fair to suggest that an unstopping unexplained noise can cause extreme distress. I dislike the wording "driving people insane" because I work in de-stigmatising MH problems, but the meaning is clear.
Here's an example of a mysterious noise from England.
http://www.bristolpost.co.uk/HUM-KNOW/story-20347005-detail/...
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum
EDIT --
I'd be interested to know what happens if they build a chamber that is provably isolated from "The Hum" and put sufferers inside it. Do those people still experience it? Even better if there's some kind of double blind way of isolating / not isolating the chamber from the Hum.
I can actually appreciate that it could test people's sanity over long periods of time.
That part seems obvious and a given. The whole bit about radio waves... The article tries to bridge the two by claiming that the suspect furnace near Windsor is producing "VLF waves" (maybe they're adopting it to audio frequency, but given the other parts it seems like they're trying to bridge the radio thing), only it's actually creating low frequency acoustic waves, measured seismically. Just normal noise, carrying enormous distances and irritating people. Just as irritating as the guy in the Honda Civic with the giant subs playing rap music.
(That offer holds for any story, btw. The best way to criticize a bad title is to suggest a better one.)
The article itself seems fine for HN.
My first test would be stuffing their ears and putting them in a perfectly isolated acoustic chamber to see if they still hear it. I'm pretty sure they would.
http://xkcd.com/1138/
(It might help to include some explanation in your comment.)
Therefore, each pixel of the cartogram contains an equal number of people in it.
If you bin your heatmap into pixels with equal number of people in them, then HOT regions in the final image will correspond not merely to the number of people who live in an area (like in the xkcd), but to the percentage of a constant number of people.
You can still recognize the underlying geography, because the population density isn't CRAZY skewed.
Here are some well-documented cartograms that give you a feel for what they can do:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/11/01/163632378...
Maybe you need to cull places where there are too few people and 1 hum sufferer might already cause lots of heat, but I expect the result would be a proper amount of hum sufferers compared to total population of the place, maybe this way you can trace sources of those hums.
Also I bet lots of people don't talk about this publicy, because people say they are crazy or the sound is inside their head, I mentioned a high-frequency buzzing sound I hear on my apartment, and people already threw lots of disparaging and senseless remarks to me (even with me being very explicit that the sound comes from outside, because I cannot hear it when I close my windows or go to window-less rooms)
Aren't VLF radio waves supposed to be very very weak energy-wise? Why would your body pick those.
I realize that this is entering conspiracy theory territory, but generating VLF from a distance is one of the things this thing does.
If there is any sort of community built around a potentially hard to observe phenomenon, it's likely going to be a mess sorting out true stuff from false stuff.
I've had an occasional rumbling in my left ear. It increases when on a cellphone or skype. Certain voices can also trigger it.
I had assumed it was musculo-skeletal; it developed after a bike accident where I hurt the left part of my jaw.
But if their hum is constant, it's definitely not what I'm hearing.
Plus, allegedly they've been able to record the Hum in some cases.
The author continues with:
The study did not find that the blast furnace was radiating VLF waves (VLF being a term limited to EM waves) but rather that it was emitting sound waves in the 30-35Hz range. 30-35Hz is the SLF EM range, so even if the author conflated the types of 'waves', I'm not sure where they got VLF from.And then:
No, it really doesn't, it just found a loud blast furnace. Not to take anything away from the work needed, locating a sound source at frequencies that low in a complex environment isn't trivial.It could still be chemical / something in the air that makes you hallucinate, but not talking about such basic questions is just so different from how I think.
the next most basic question is whether there are actually any physical sounds at any frequency - if microphones aren't sensitive enough at certain frequencies to tell us, then I would lead with that. If they're sensitive enough, but show nothing, then I would lead with that and then show a differential as to why it's not psychosomatic, or a chemical poison that gives you this effect, etc.
I just found this article too different from how I think to read through.
I asked that too, but some people like/love their cities, houses, relatives and friends and jobs. They don't just move on the first issue that happens.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen_gas_field
As I get older, I hear some sounds I am certain are like tinnitus. It terrifies me because I love and need quiet. But so far I've been able to move around, create some other sounds, and the fake sound stops. But tinnitus is a disease of old age.
Sorta OT, but I've actually been able to get some use out of my tinnitus. If there's background noise that's preventing me from falling asleep (but nothing too loud), I can purposefully focus on the sound of my tinnitus. It becomes more prominent and effectively drowns out the sound that keeps me awake.
I've also tried to use the hum as reference point to get perfect pitch earing, that is been able to tell if a note is a C, a F or whatever. Unfortunatly my tinnitus seems to be composed of several frequencies and out of tune. I can't make any use of it for musical purposes (yet).
But if tinnitus comes during your lifetime you do have a reference point, and you will most likely notice.
I have mild tinnitus and my self-experiments have been inconclusive - in some instances kneading my masseter and the other, minor, jaw muscles has seemed to give relief, but nothing obvious.
Incidentally, I also sometimes experience another form of "tinnitus" (not sure what to call it) that manifests itself as a swooshing sound when I move my eyeballs quickly. It's most noticeable if I'm tired or under the weather in some form. I'm curious if anyone else has experienced something similiar?
I don't suffer the severe symptoms decribed in the article. I think that Hum must be doing something else to the bodys of those affected.
My tinnitus, after some weeks of adaptation, became part of normal life. I can sleep, concentrate and so on. I do miss the old silence sometimes. Good music is the new silence.
Soon people will start destroying all the machines!
This is a very important point. Low frequency noises can have a wavelength exactly the size of common rooms, yielding an unbearable amplification as the waves gang up with common peaks and troughs.
http://www.bobgolds.com/Mode/RoomModes.htm
1) Locate someone suffering from the hum.
2) Take expensive pressure and sound equipment to their location.
3) Record all observable frequencies.
4) a) If nothing shows up, it's a personal biological problem. Direct problem toward medical professionals b) If something shows up on the frequency graph, identify the direction the sound is coming from (again using equipment that, you know, has been designed for this kind of thing and has been around for ages).
5) Follow sound, locate source.
6) Voilà, problem solved.
Someone tell me why it's not that simple.
You missed the part that it's a low frequency noise. Not very locatable those bastards.
Yeah, if it gets that bad, how about ...well, MOVING elsewhere?
Maybe some people begin to sub/consciously listen for their phone to buzz, vibrate or make a sound and notice the noise of air, static noise, computer fan hums, blood traveling inner ear?
Their utilities run @ 50hz. Maybe there's a conflict with older and newer products manufactured from other countries?
Maybe doppler radar.
Maybe dead air space.
Maybe they're not used to the sound of silence.