![\"\"](\"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/hum.jpg\")
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I first noticed the hum many weeks ago. When I first became conscious of it, I gave it little thought. Though this area is very quiet, engine noises can carry a long way. When I heard it in the middle of the night, it became more puzzling, because I couldn’t think of any reason why a large diesel engine would be idling a mile or two away in the middle of the night. Now that I’m aware of it, I hear the hum almost every day — or night.<\/p>\n
Before I had read about the hum, I had described it to a neighbor the same way many others have described it. It sounds like a large diesel engine idling — a train engine, for example — about a mile or more away. It does not change pitch or volume. The sound is either there or not there. Eventually I Googled for something like “low pitched rumbling sound” and discovered that it is called the hum. It has been reported all over the world. Here is a link to the Wikipedia article<\/a>. If you Google for “the hum,” you’ll find many articles about it. It has been reported that only 2 percent of people can hear it. Why me? My hearing is pretty good, especially for someone my age. Also it’s usually very quiet here.<\/p>\n At first I dismissed the sound as a form of tinnitus, or as some sort of pneumatic phenomenon having to do with how the outside air flows around the roof of my house. But after a few weeks, I became increasingly confident that the sound is real. Then it dawned on me to see if I could measure the sound with a sound-measuring app on my iPhone.<\/p>\n I have not yet done enough measuring to feel highly confident of what I’m seeing in the “Decibel X” app. But so far I think the app is confirming what I hear. When I don’t hear the hum, the background noise level averages around 30 decibels, at the whisper level. When I do hear the hum, the noise level averages about 37 decibels. The background noise here always seems to be concentrated at frequencies below 90Hz. But if I had to guess at the frequency of the hum, I’d put it as around 50 Hz.<\/p>\n Assuming that the hum is real, I have no theory about what is causing it. But I’m now 99 percent convinced that it’s real.<\/p>\n Does anyone else hear the hum?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I first noticed the hum many weeks ago. When I first became conscious of it, I gave it little thought. Though this area is very quiet, engine noises can carry a long way. When I heard it in the middle of the night, it became more puzzling, because I couldn’t think of any reason why … Continue reading “Oh no. I hear the hum.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20768"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20768\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20782,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20768\/revisions\/20782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}