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

2026-07-09 · Signals & Sounds · 8 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, and 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 or a neighbor and asks the obvious question, the answer is almost always the same: I don't hear anything.

This is the Hum, a phenomenon reported on several continents for more than half a century. It has been investigated by municipal councils, by university acoustics departments and, in one celebrated case, by scientists from two national weapons laboratories. In the great majority of the places where it has been reported, no source has ever been identified.

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