As one who can hear these sounds, I can attest to how maddening it is. It's even worse when (most of) the people around you can't hear it, and they don't believe you.
Earplugs only make it worse, because they filter out ambient noise that otherwise helps distract you from the incessant hum. Daytime is not as bad as night because of the natural activity sounds of a city.
I have read that waves and underwater currents hitting the shore (or below the shore) can cause vibrations that will translate through the earth. That could be a cause of such sounds in some parts of the world.
When I lived in the mountains of Colorado, with few people around and no industrial equipment anywhere, this hum would come and go and drive me nuts at night. I finally came to the theory that it was certain wind conditions going over the mountain ridge (across the valley), creating a pressure differential on the other side of the ridge. After the differential would reach a certain threshold, the air pattern would break up and create a pooof. This is sort of like if you are sitting in front of a campfire and the flame is going mostly on just one side of a log, but every second or so it breaks around both sides. The sound is identical, but singular. Although if it happens at a fast enough rhythm, it becomes a frequency that sounds very similar to a "hum". Of course the fire burns the wood and the conditions that make that happen change soon.
I have wondered what kind of measurement equipment it would take to try to identify the source... triangulate it somehow. I really wish I knew the definitive answers to some of these hums.
I was plagued by the Hum for years. At times it became astonishingly loud. But I was able (eventually) to figure it out.
Short version: I made many attempts to track it down. Used low frequency Microphones, filters, amplifiers, etc, as well as PC Spectrogram programs to try and and visualise and record it. Visited many nearby industries etc to try and find it. But none of my attempts did any good.
As I'm a Radio Engineer I spent ages experimenting with VLF Receivers, Spectrum Analysers, etc.
One thing I noticed however was that the Hum was much worse when I was living in a quiet rural area.
One night however, I noticed that I could affect the hum by doing the swallow maneuver that divers use to equalise ear pressure. I slowly came to understand that my Hum was an internally generated sound.
Apparently there are various possible mechanisms: The simplest is blood flow near the ear. But also the tiny hairs in the ear canal actually have tiny muscles which cause feed-back or "regeneration" to make our ears more sensitive, and the frequency response of each hair cell much sharper. However at times, this regeneration can slip over into actual Oscillation.
This ability of the ear to actually generate sounds is well documented. It can actually be loud enough for a Doctor or a partner to hear. It's called Objective tinnitus.
In my case, the Hum eventually disappeared and has never returned. I suspect that it coincided with a change in blood pressure medication, but I can't be sure.
Looking back, I would suggest that it may be worth trying to amplify the sounds via a set of high-quality earphones and appropriate filters, etc, using the headphones as microphones.
I have been working on a project to use some DIY bone conduction "headphones" to do directed noise canceling because I'm on the autistic spectrum and loud places bug the shit out of me and make it so i can't focus. Bone conduction is neat because it works inside your head and doesn't cover your ears. I think BC noise canceling is really under explored for audio related stress issues.
I'm putting a mic on the back of my head to pull the room then stereo directional mics out front to actively noise cancel the room but not the person I'm looking at in a cone that I can fiddle with. Initial tests seem to work! I'm trying to improve it with a crossover for low frequency on the jaw just under my earlobes and a mid/high driver on my temple. I think even a commercial setup for bike riders and some experimentation you might be able to find some relief. I've found them to be lacking in lower frequency which is why I'm using stronger drivers and the below the ear positioning.
Might be something to try playing with. It's pretty inexpensive. I'm using "Surface Transducers" from Adafruit and an STM32F4 Discovery board to process the noise canceling (has great FFT libs). All in my current setup is maybe $150 with a couple iterations under my belt.
Next step would probably to get a few of these, see if you can record the hum on a few of them, and then start experimenting.
The theory behind triangulation is simple. But in practice, it's probably really hard to make sure all microphones have the same sensitivity. The standard approach depends on sounds being quieter when they are far away, but if one mic is naturally quieter (deeper inside the house, or more absorbant material, or just more obstacles in the way) that no longer works.
The best approach would be using a phase difference to measure. Exploiting the delay due to the speed of sound.
That means you need some way to synchronize the recordings. Presuming a 20hz signal, you'd need your synchronization to be better than 0.05 seconds.
This also requires the hum waveform to be easy to match. That is, you'd need to be able to tell the phase offset by matching parts of the sound.
You could also try a 'big data' approach, just cataloging all reported cases and looking for patterns. That requires dealing with very noisy data though, as reported cases will be inconsistent. This is due to people not always being home, not everyone hearing it, and no verification of reports.
edit:
Interesing idea: use the 'bit data' approach together with wind speed and direction. The sound should be easier to hear when the wind blows it towards you. With enough data and corresponding wind data, you might have something.
Does require compensating for correlation between time of day and the wind. If wind is west in the night, and less people hear things when the wind is west, that might just be because they are sleeping.
This has been cited as a possible explanation for strange noises in the mountains at various locations and also as a possible cause of the infamous Dyatlov Pass incident.
I'm confused. The attached NY Times video clip has a very audible and noticeable hum and throb – it can't be just infrasound. Is that the actual hum people are hearing/not hearing? Or is it an attempt to reproduce it, perhaps?
That's funny, when I moved to Colorado was the first time I started hearing it. My wife can't hear it at all but it's so loud sometimes at night it drives me crazy. It's not in my head, it's definitely coming from a certain direction. Its very low, I can barely see it on an app I put on my phone, "Spectroid". I'm pretty sure I know what it is, the coal trains moving down the front range. The tracks are like 10 miles away but the sound is so big and low that when the weather is right it propagates for miles. If I can hear it while the train is on a 20 mile stretch of track then a new train will come before the previous fades. I'd wager that distant freight trains and a gentle breeze cause this noise for a lot of people.
I used to live right next to a busy highway, and that higher pitched white noise didn't bother me once. This unstoppable deep noise is incessantly annoying.
If I open the front window and back window in my car then drive at a specific speed I get a very weird woop-woop-woop and it feels like the air is pushing me back and forth in my seat. It pulses my head.
For low frequency stuff, I would suggest using an accelerometer instead of conventional audio equipment. A small one could also be placed on a large diaphragm to allow more movement at really low frequencies.
I like the physiological suggestions in the replies, but I don't see how an entire community could suffer from the same thing without a common cause.
I can hear these sounds too. Earplugs definitely make it worse. I grew up in a small town right next to a huge military base and aircraft flyovers were a very frequent occurrence. To me the sound sort of reminds me of a really faint helicopter or really faint jet engine in the distance, just on the edge of hearing.
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.
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.
We can put Hamburg (Germany) on the list of "humming cities" too. When I moved close to the harbour I started hearing a humming sound, espececially at night, almost exclusively indoors.
None of my flatmates heard that sound, so I started questioning my perception until I found another person living in the same building hearing that sound. Our bedrooms are located one below the other and the sound is most perceivable in that rooms, but we can hear that sound at other places inside the building too while others can not.
Some time later, articles in various local newspapers about that hum appeared (search for "Brummen Hamburg" if you're interested, unfortunately only articles in german), telling stories about various people along the river "Elbe" hearing that hum. I started reading about the Windsor and Bristol hum that time too.
A local politician started investigating that issue together with scientist from a technical university but - besides some theories (e.g. a big power plant) which couldn't be proven - with no success. The acousticians where cited that some of them could hear the hum at various places too, but in terms of sound level they couldn't measure it distincly from the "general" background noises of the city (with harbour, industry and much highway traffic).
In the last few years there wasn't much news about it but the hum is still there in varying intensity and duration.
I take prescription stimulants for APD, audio processing disorder; whatever that actually is.. For me, I have difficulty hearing people talk and focusing when exposed to multiple or dynamic background noises.. Basically it's a failure of autonomous filtering or prioritizing of sounds.
I was on Belle Isle last year, two times, which is a few hundred meters from Windsor, and the sound was extremely soothing for whatever reason.. I spent days on end thinking and reaearching. I finally attributed the sound to some sort of tunnel boring machinery. There are a handful of salt mines in windsor, which i discovered after seeing more than the two tunnels I was aware of, between Detroit and Windsor, in the river, on Google Earth.
I am in the habit of identifying every sound that I am exposed to consistently, which I noticed when I bought a new house. After moving I diligently inspected my HVAC system, computer fans, appliances, which neighbors parked where, and how hard they slammed their doors, etc. Not only do I identify every sound, but I also actively recognize and consider every combination of sounds.(neighbor1.carDoorSlam sounds different when my furnace is on, or furnace+fridge compressor, for example.) Once I know for certain what a sound is, I can identify it immediately, and continue with my current activity knowing that it was just some irrelevant, petty routine happening.
I can't imagine enduring a sound like that for long, while knowing I am unable to identify it; I was able to convince myself that it was due to tunnel boring; but I seldom am reminded of the sound and never disturbed by it, since I don't live in the area..
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).
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.
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.
As a kid I remember going past the area around Zug Island on a boat.
I have a distinct memory of the huge stacks billowing yellow smoke, and the twists of ductwork forming structures that look like hellish versions of the buildings from a Dr Seuss story [1][2]. It was simultaneously amazing and terrifying, and I couldn't take my eyes off it until it passed out of view.
Years later I'd learn about how poorer neighborhoods were in the shadows of and downwind of such places.
I don't know if this place is uniquely terrible or this is the invariable cost of steel production. But I imagine this sort of thing is common in the industrializing world today, where a lot of steel is produced. Is there an example of a "better" way to make steel?
The photos are 'impeccable' art, but the subjects are definitely 'awful'. Along with looking at a series of photos of mills, I gained a much better appreciation for the visceral disgust people have (historically) had about 'industry'. They truly look like outposts of Evil.
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.
I'm not sure it's related to these humming reports but there is a lot more ambient noise than most people appreciate.
I live about five miles from Heathrow airport. Occasionally I will have planes taking off over our house which is fairly loud and sometimes I can hear them powering up and taking off - that's quiet and distant and I can't always hear it.
When the Icelandic volcano closed the airspace a few years ago I was stuck by how quiet it was outside. Not just the lack of identifiable take-off noises but I became aware there had been an imperceptible continuous rumble. This came back when the airspace opened.
There are always aircraft in the skies, I presume this low level noise is the culmination of many distant jet engines.
Would "the hum" not be noticed in a lot more areas if it were caused by jet engines?
Note that there is some variance in the volume of air traffic: weekend nights tend to be a lot slower than weeknights. Same for Christmas Day (and the night before and after). If "the hum" was caused by jet engines, this variance should be noticed too. The risk of misattribution is considerable, however, as industrial and other activities also tend to wind down during weekends and holidays.
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.
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.
Now I am deeply curious! I’m a Detroiter and Zug Island is a quick drive south. Is it audible from the US side? I have a passport, but “I want to hear the Windsor hum” might not, unfortunately, fly at the border anymore.
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.
I witnessed something similar some years ago, in Lisbon.
Our living room had a window facing the street, and sometimes one could hear a low pitch humming noise that made that window shake. The first time it happened I remember wondering who would leave a delivery truck in neutral for so long.
It was really annoying, especially because when I opened the window, there wasn't a car parked outside - everything was silent. Until you listened carefully, only to confirm the hum was still there, seemingly at a distance.
So the window was reverberating to the hum. But where did it come from? Across the street there is a military academy, so I guessed the obvious guess: military experiments, of course!
The problem with that guess was that under closer inspection, the noise didn't really seem to come from that direction. Usually, one could only hear it in the afternoon, but the hum was present all week round - and around there only the military worked weekends. But it just looked it came from in between some trees far away. So I guessed differently: a big air conditioning system, some large boat, a generator in some construction yard, a concrete mixer...
The hum's amplitude would slightly vary, and the window would just hum along or even rattle annoyingly sometimes. So I guessed that if wind was a factor in modulating the hum's intensity, it would be relatively far away. Either that or it was coming from a moving source.
One day the hum simply stopped. I never found out was was behind it.
Out of interest, how do we know it's not a common but undocumented form of tinnitus? Perhaps one that is more likely to present in certain weather conditions, so people's complaints will correlate?
I live near Bristol, which also has a hum, and I may have heard it but my own presumption would be hearing damage, as I don't think I've looked after my ears as well as I should have. And that would go for a lot of Bristol residents too... good music scene there!
Sound is such a context-dependent experience. I vividly remember taking a walk with my parents in the Alps through the most pristine landscape. It was beautiful, except for the annoying sounds of a nearby highway. A few minutes later, we expected to see that highway across one hill, but were astonished to find a glorious waterfall. The instant we saw the water, the experience of the sound was transformed to something entirely beautiful.
[+] [-] blunte|8 years ago|reply
Earplugs only make it worse, because they filter out ambient noise that otherwise helps distract you from the incessant hum. Daytime is not as bad as night because of the natural activity sounds of a city.
I have read that waves and underwater currents hitting the shore (or below the shore) can cause vibrations that will translate through the earth. That could be a cause of such sounds in some parts of the world.
When I lived in the mountains of Colorado, with few people around and no industrial equipment anywhere, this hum would come and go and drive me nuts at night. I finally came to the theory that it was certain wind conditions going over the mountain ridge (across the valley), creating a pressure differential on the other side of the ridge. After the differential would reach a certain threshold, the air pattern would break up and create a pooof. This is sort of like if you are sitting in front of a campfire and the flame is going mostly on just one side of a log, but every second or so it breaks around both sides. The sound is identical, but singular. Although if it happens at a fast enough rhythm, it becomes a frequency that sounds very similar to a "hum". Of course the fire burns the wood and the conditions that make that happen change soon.
I have wondered what kind of measurement equipment it would take to try to identify the source... triangulate it somehow. I really wish I knew the definitive answers to some of these hums.
[+] [-] Johnythree|8 years ago|reply
Short version: I made many attempts to track it down. Used low frequency Microphones, filters, amplifiers, etc, as well as PC Spectrogram programs to try and and visualise and record it. Visited many nearby industries etc to try and find it. But none of my attempts did any good.
As I'm a Radio Engineer I spent ages experimenting with VLF Receivers, Spectrum Analysers, etc.
One thing I noticed however was that the Hum was much worse when I was living in a quiet rural area.
One night however, I noticed that I could affect the hum by doing the swallow maneuver that divers use to equalise ear pressure. I slowly came to understand that my Hum was an internally generated sound.
Apparently there are various possible mechanisms: The simplest is blood flow near the ear. But also the tiny hairs in the ear canal actually have tiny muscles which cause feed-back or "regeneration" to make our ears more sensitive, and the frequency response of each hair cell much sharper. However at times, this regeneration can slip over into actual Oscillation.
This ability of the ear to actually generate sounds is well documented. It can actually be loud enough for a Doctor or a partner to hear. It's called Objective tinnitus.
In my case, the Hum eventually disappeared and has never returned. I suspect that it coincided with a change in blood pressure medication, but I can't be sure.
Looking back, I would suggest that it may be worth trying to amplify the sounds via a set of high-quality earphones and appropriate filters, etc, using the headphones as microphones.
[+] [-] stuntkite|8 years ago|reply
I'm putting a mic on the back of my head to pull the room then stereo directional mics out front to actively noise cancel the room but not the person I'm looking at in a cone that I can fiddle with. Initial tests seem to work! I'm trying to improve it with a crossover for low frequency on the jaw just under my earlobes and a mid/high driver on my temple. I think even a commercial setup for bike riders and some experimentation you might be able to find some relief. I've found them to be lacking in lower frequency which is why I'm using stronger drivers and the below the ear positioning.
Might be something to try playing with. It's pretty inexpensive. I'm using "Surface Transducers" from Adafruit and an STM32F4 Discovery board to process the noise canceling (has great FFT libs). All in my current setup is maybe $150 with a couple iterations under my belt.
[+] [-] rocqua|8 years ago|reply
Next step would probably to get a few of these, see if you can record the hum on a few of them, and then start experimenting.
The theory behind triangulation is simple. But in practice, it's probably really hard to make sure all microphones have the same sensitivity. The standard approach depends on sounds being quieter when they are far away, but if one mic is naturally quieter (deeper inside the house, or more absorbant material, or just more obstacles in the way) that no longer works.
The best approach would be using a phase difference to measure. Exploiting the delay due to the speed of sound. That means you need some way to synchronize the recordings. Presuming a 20hz signal, you'd need your synchronization to be better than 0.05 seconds. This also requires the hum waveform to be easy to match. That is, you'd need to be able to tell the phase offset by matching parts of the sound.
You could also try a 'big data' approach, just cataloging all reported cases and looking for patterns. That requires dealing with very noisy data though, as reported cases will be inconsistent. This is due to people not always being home, not everyone hearing it, and no verification of reports.
edit: Interesing idea: use the 'bit data' approach together with wind speed and direction. The sound should be easier to hear when the wind blows it towards you. With enough data and corresponding wind data, you might have something. Does require compensating for correlation between time of day and the wind. If wind is west in the night, and less people hear things when the wind is west, that might just be because they are sleeping.
[+] [-] davesque|8 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_vortex_street
This has been cited as a possible explanation for strange noises in the mountains at various locations and also as a possible cause of the infamous Dyatlov Pass incident.
[+] [-] phlakaton|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phyller|8 years ago|reply
I used to live right next to a busy highway, and that higher pitched white noise didn't bother me once. This unstoppable deep noise is incessantly annoying.
[+] [-] monk_e_boy|8 years ago|reply
Wonder if it is something similar.
[+] [-] phkahler|8 years ago|reply
I like the physiological suggestions in the replies, but I don't see how an entire community could suffer from the same thing without a common cause.
[+] [-] rootw0rm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blattimwind|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Waterluvian|8 years ago|reply
I wonder if the hum persists during a power outage.
[+] [-] schlowmo|8 years ago|reply
None of my flatmates heard that sound, so I started questioning my perception until I found another person living in the same building hearing that sound. Our bedrooms are located one below the other and the sound is most perceivable in that rooms, but we can hear that sound at other places inside the building too while others can not.
Some time later, articles in various local newspapers about that hum appeared (search for "Brummen Hamburg" if you're interested, unfortunately only articles in german), telling stories about various people along the river "Elbe" hearing that hum. I started reading about the Windsor and Bristol hum that time too.
A local politician started investigating that issue together with scientist from a technical university but - besides some theories (e.g. a big power plant) which couldn't be proven - with no success. The acousticians where cited that some of them could hear the hum at various places too, but in terms of sound level they couldn't measure it distincly from the "general" background noises of the city (with harbour, industry and much highway traffic).
In the last few years there wasn't much news about it but the hum is still there in varying intensity and duration.
[+] [-] trowway21|8 years ago|reply
I was on Belle Isle last year, two times, which is a few hundred meters from Windsor, and the sound was extremely soothing for whatever reason.. I spent days on end thinking and reaearching. I finally attributed the sound to some sort of tunnel boring machinery. There are a handful of salt mines in windsor, which i discovered after seeing more than the two tunnels I was aware of, between Detroit and Windsor, in the river, on Google Earth.
I am in the habit of identifying every sound that I am exposed to consistently, which I noticed when I bought a new house. After moving I diligently inspected my HVAC system, computer fans, appliances, which neighbors parked where, and how hard they slammed their doors, etc. Not only do I identify every sound, but I also actively recognize and consider every combination of sounds.(neighbor1.carDoorSlam sounds different when my furnace is on, or furnace+fridge compressor, for example.) Once I know for certain what a sound is, I can identify it immediately, and continue with my current activity knowing that it was just some irrelevant, petty routine happening.
I can't imagine enduring a sound like that for long, while knowing I am unable to identify it; I was able to convince myself that it was due to tunnel boring; but I seldom am reminded of the sound and never disturbed by it, since I don't live in the area..
[+] [-] throwaway613834|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPDILKQjJW8
[+] [-] ryanmarsh|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] blfr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] incompatible|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danans|8 years ago|reply
I have a distinct memory of the huge stacks billowing yellow smoke, and the twists of ductwork forming structures that look like hellish versions of the buildings from a Dr Seuss story [1][2]. It was simultaneously amazing and terrifying, and I couldn't take my eyes off it until it passed out of view.
Years later I'd learn about how poorer neighborhoods were in the shadows of and downwind of such places.
I don't know if this place is uniquely terrible or this is the invariable cost of steel production. But I imagine this sort of thing is common in the industrializing world today, where a lot of steel is produced. Is there an example of a "better" way to make steel?
[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/gsgeorge/3705474769
[2] http://rebelmetropolis.org/a-hellscape-among-the-ruins-zug-i...
[+] [-] aeorgnoieang|8 years ago|reply
- https://smile.amazon.com/Blast-Furnaces-Bernd-Becher/dp/0262...
The photos are 'impeccable' art, but the subjects are definitely 'awful'. Along with looking at a series of photos of mills, I gained a much better appreciation for the visceral disgust people have (historically) had about 'industry'. They truly look like outposts of Evil.
[+] [-] acomjean|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cshenton|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madez|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joejev|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway613834|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Steve44|8 years ago|reply
I live about five miles from Heathrow airport. Occasionally I will have planes taking off over our house which is fairly loud and sometimes I can hear them powering up and taking off - that's quiet and distant and I can't always hear it.
When the Icelandic volcano closed the airspace a few years ago I was stuck by how quiet it was outside. Not just the lack of identifiable take-off noises but I became aware there had been an imperceptible continuous rumble. This came back when the airspace opened.
There are always aircraft in the skies, I presume this low level noise is the culmination of many distant jet engines.
[+] [-] asclepi|8 years ago|reply
Note that there is some variance in the volume of air traffic: weekend nights tend to be a lot slower than weeknights. Same for Christmas Day (and the night before and after). If "the hum" was caused by jet engines, this variance should be noticed too. The risk of misattribution is considerable, however, as industrial and other activities also tend to wind down during weekends and holidays.
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|8 years ago|reply
I think there's a bit of armchairing going on here, in that people are definitely trying the obvious already.
[+] [-] RobertDeNiro|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] narrator|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rmason|8 years ago|reply
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/06/28/shotspotte...
[+] [-] loorinm|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mcbutterbunz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|8 years ago|reply
Another problem:
Zug Island is in Michigan (US).
Windsor is in Ontario (Canada).
[+] [-] vonzep|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] subroutine|8 years ago|reply
http://www.thehum.info
[+] [-] tachyoff|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hawktheslayer|8 years ago|reply
https://www.20k.org/episodes/mystery
[+] [-] jedberg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lokopodium|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcims|8 years ago|reply
Also the sound could be reflecting downward from cloud/temp layers, greatly complicating it.
Not to say it's not possible, just super tricky.
[+] [-] chicob|8 years ago|reply
Our living room had a window facing the street, and sometimes one could hear a low pitch humming noise that made that window shake. The first time it happened I remember wondering who would leave a delivery truck in neutral for so long.
It was really annoying, especially because when I opened the window, there wasn't a car parked outside - everything was silent. Until you listened carefully, only to confirm the hum was still there, seemingly at a distance.
So the window was reverberating to the hum. But where did it come from? Across the street there is a military academy, so I guessed the obvious guess: military experiments, of course!
The problem with that guess was that under closer inspection, the noise didn't really seem to come from that direction. Usually, one could only hear it in the afternoon, but the hum was present all week round - and around there only the military worked weekends. But it just looked it came from in between some trees far away. So I guessed differently: a big air conditioning system, some large boat, a generator in some construction yard, a concrete mixer...
The hum's amplitude would slightly vary, and the window would just hum along or even rattle annoyingly sometimes. So I guessed that if wind was a factor in modulating the hum's intensity, it would be relatively far away. Either that or it was coming from a moving source.
One day the hum simply stopped. I never found out was was behind it.
[+] [-] sideshowb|8 years ago|reply
I live near Bristol, which also has a hum, and I may have heard it but my own presumption would be hearing damage, as I don't think I've looked after my ears as well as I should have. And that would go for a lot of Bristol residents too... good music scene there!
[+] [-] fab1an|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trophycase|8 years ago|reply