The Hum: The Sound Only 2% of People Can Hear

2026-06-20 · Signals & Sounds · 9 min read

It almost always begins at night. A low, throbbing drone rises out of the silence, like a heavy truck idling in the next street or a distant engine that never quite switches off. The listener gets up, walks the house, unplugs the refrigerator, kills the fuse box, stands in the yard straining to place it. Nothing. The sound does not come from the appliances, or the road, or the neighbor's air conditioner. Earplugs do not stop it; if anything they make it worse, because it seems to come from inside the skull as much as from the air. And when the sufferer turns to a husband, a wife, a neighbor and asks the obvious question, the answer is always the same, and always unsettling in its ordinariness: I don't hear anything.

This is the Hum, a phenomenon reported on several continents for more than half a century and fully explained in almost none of them. The first celebrated outbreak rose in the early 1970s in Bristol, in the west of England, where hundreds of people complained to the local council of a low, rumbling noise that frayed nerves and stole sleep; investigators blamed traffic and industry but never closed the case. Two decades later a small high-desert town gave the phenomenon the name the world now uses. In the early 1990s residents of Taos, New Mexico, began reporting the same maddening drone, and their complaints grew loud enough to reach Congress. The Taos Hum would become the most studied instance of all, and one of the most stubborn.

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