Sounding off

Noodling around on Wikipedia, sometimes you run into the oddest stuff.

I was looking something up yesterday and saw an associated link to a page called "List of Unexplained Sounds."  Well, I couldn't pass by something like that, so off I went down that rabbit hole.  As advertised, the page is a compendium of odd noises that have been heard (many have been recorded, so we know that those at least aren't someone's overactive imagination).  There are sound clips for a few of them, so I highly recommend going to the page and checking them out.

Here are a few of the ones listed -- with some possible explanations.

Upsweep is the name given to a sound consisting of a repeated series of rising tones that sound to my ears a little like a siren.  The source of the sound has been identified as being somewhere near 54° S latitude, 140° W longitude, placing it a little less than halfway from New Zealand and Cape Horn.  This, to put it mildly, is the middle of abso-fucking-lutely nowhere; in fact, it's not far from Point Nemo, also known as the "oceanic pole of maximum inaccessibility," which at 48°52.6′S 123°23.6′W is the point on Earth that is maximally distant from land.  There's a conjecture that Upsweep might be some kind of sound generated by underwater volcanic activity, but it's not exactly convenient to go out there and check, so that hypothesis is unproven.

The Bloop is a famous noise, once again heard in the Pacific Ocean, that is ultra-low frequency and extremely high amplitude -- meaning it can travel thousands of miles from its source.  The guess here is that the Bloop is a sound made by large icebergs breaking up (or scraping the seafloor), but I've heard an alternate hypothesis that I like better, which is that it's Cthulhu snoring.  Cthulhu, as you probably know, is the octopoid Elder God who was put into a charmèd sleep in his underwater city of Rl'yeh, where he's waiting for his followers to summon him back.  Why anyone would want to do so remains to be seen, because if you've read any H. P. Lovecraft, you know that the ones who try to reawaken him always end up dying in nasty ways, so it seems to me it might be better to leave him blooping peacefully in Rl'yeh.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dominique Signoret (signodom.club.fr), Cthulhu and R'lyeh, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Some sounds have only been heard once, but are weird enough to bear mention.  These include Julia, which was given its name because it sounds like someone saying the name in a weird, hooting voice.  This is another one that is probably due to icebergs; its origin was pinpointed to somewhere near Cape Adare, Antarctica, but it was loud enough to be recorded by the entire Equatorial Pacific Autonomous Hydrophone Array.

The Ping is much more local; it's only been reported from the Fury and Hecla Strait between Baffin Island and the Melville Peninsula, Nunavut, Canada.  Although it's likely to be from some kind of marine animal, it's strange enough (and has been reported enough times) that "the Canadian military is investigating."

Not all of them are oceanic sounds.  One of the weirdest is the Forest Grove Sound, heard multiple times near Forest Grove, Oregon in February of 2016.  It was variously described as "a mechanical scream," "a giant flute played off pitch," and "akin to a bad one-note violin solo broadcast over a microphone with nonstop feedback."  There was an investigation, and it was never satisfactorily resolved -- and has not been heard since.

Last, there are the Moodus Noises, heard near Moodus, Connecticut, which unlike the Forest Grove Sound, have been heard for centuries (the indigenous people of the area, mostly from the Narragansett Tribe, supposedly have a long tradition of weird noises coming from nearby Cave Hill and Mt. Tom).  The Moodus Noises have a different Lovecraftian connection -- apparently they were the inspiration for the strange noises that came from Sentinel Hill in the spine-chilling story "The Dunwich Horror."  The more prosaic explanation for the Moodus Noises is that they come from microquakes, but -- needless to say -- there are a lot of people who don't buy that, and think the region is haunted.

So there you have it; a sampler of weird and unexplained sounds.  You should definitely check out the page and listen to some of the clips, which are goosebump-inducing.  While I do think they all have perfectly ordinary natural explanations, being a diehard skeptic doesn't mean I'm immune from getting the creeps now and again.

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Hum analysis

Some of my readers might know about the strange, mysterious humming noises that have been reported everywhere from Taos, New Mexico to Auckland, New Zealand.  The phenomenon has been reported in so many different locales that there's a Wikipedia page dedicated to it.

Explanations have varied, and to be fair, it's probable that the same cause doesn't account for all of the various hums in the world.  The Kokomo Hum and the West Seattle Hum were both adequately explained as low-frequency sound vibrations from machinery, the one in Kokomo from the Daimler-Chrysler plant, the one in West Seattle from a vacuum pump used by CalPortland to offload cargo from ships.

Some, though, are not so easily explained.  The Auckland Hum, which was pinpointed by people who heard it at 56 Hertz, and the Taos Hum, found to be between 32 and 80 Hertz, have never been adequately explained, leaving skeptics wondering if they might not be a combination of tinnitus and people paying such rapt attention to the silence that they begin to think they're hearing something.  Neither of those has ever been recorded or detected by sound equipment, despite the fact that any sound in that frequency range audible to human ears should be easy to detect.  (Especially given that one guy who has heard the Taos Hum said it was audible from 48 kilometers away.)

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Now, however, we have some research indicating that at least some of the world's Hums are due to a fascinating, and little-understood, phenomenon; the movement of deep ocean waves across uneven parts of the abyssal seafloor producing compression waves (better known as "sound") that could, potentially, propagate a great distance relatively unimpeded.  The study, by Fabrice Ardhuin, Lucia Gualtieri, and Eléonore Stutzmann of the Laboratoire d'Océanographie Spatiale, in Brest, France studied short-period interactions between oceanic waves and the terrain across which they were passing.  The vibrations, called "microseismic activity," might generate a sound where the wave fronts meet the boundary between air and water, thus creating a humming noise.  The authors write:

Microseismic activity, recorded everywhere on Earth, is largely due to ocean waves. Recent progress has clearly identified sources of microseisms in the most energetic band, with periods from 3 to 10 s.  In contrast, the generation of longer-period microseisms has been strongly debated.  Two mechanisms have been proposed to explain seismic wave generation: a primary mechanism, by which ocean waves propagating over bottom slopes generate seismic waves, and a secondary mechanism which relies on the nonlinear interaction of ocean waves.  Here we show that the primary mechanism explains the average power, frequency distribution, and most of the variability in signals recorded by vertical seismometers, for seismic periods ranging from 13 to 300 s.  The secondary mechanism only explains seismic motions with periods shorter than 13 s.  Our results build on a quantitative numerical model that gives access to time-varying maps of seismic noise sources.

Whatever the source, the noises are ubiquitous.  As Columbia University seismologist Spahr Webb put it,  "The Earth is ringing like a bell all the time."

What is pretty certain, however, is that these phenomena are not the result of the archangels blowing the trumpets of the Apocalypse, as End Times loons have claimed.  As recently as last month, loud, horn-like sounds reported from Canada and Indonesia have been claimed to be signs of the imminent fulfillment of the prophecies of the Book of Revelation, despite the fact that those prophecies have been imminent for the past two thousand years, and lo, the Antichrist is nowhere to be seen.  (Nor, I might add, are they signs that we're about to collide with the planet Nibiru, which has also been on its way for some time now.)

So it remains a mystery, which a lot of people don't like.  As far as the Taos Hum, it's unlikely to be caused by oceanic waves of any sort, because Taos is not exactly beach-front property.  But I'll bank on there being some kind of rational explanation, even if we don't know what it is.

Until then, you'll either have to ignore it or else hum along.

Hums, bloops, and snores

Today I was perusing the online news and happened to note a link to LiveScience called "The Ten Top Unexplained Phenomena."  Contrary to its name, LiveScience seems to specialize in catchy little blurbs on stuff that hardly qualify as actual science, but do attract the attention because they're either about stuff that most everyone is interested in even if they won't admit it (e.g. sex) or stuff that many of us are curious about even though some of us think it's nonsense (e.g. the supernatural).  This particular "top ten list" was predictably ordinary, and listed several things as "unexplained" that I have a fairly good explanation for, such as psychic phenomena (explanation: people are gullible), UFOs (explanation: people are gullible), Bigfoot (explanation: people are gullible), and mysterious disappearances, such as that of Jimmy Hoffa (explanation: don't fuck with the Mafia).  But the last unexplained phenomenon on LiveScience's list was one I'd never heard of, so of course that caught my attention.

It's called the "Taos Hum."  The Taos Hum is, as you presumably have already figured out, a pervasive humming noise heard near Taos, New Mexico.  (Check out the Taos Hum Page if you're interested in more information, or in signing up for the Taos Hum email listserv. Of course there's a listserv.)  The Hum was featured on the television show Unsolved Mysteries a while back, wherein they tried to capture the hum on recording equipment and failed, so they instead created an audio clip that was what the hum allegedly sounds like, to people who can hear it.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

However, as anyone knows who's ever seen Unsolved Mysteries or other shows like it, they completely downplayed that the audio clip wasn't actually a recording of the real hum, but a simulation of a sound that may or may not exist in the first place.  It didn't stop them from acting all amazed and freaked out when they were listening to it, which made me want to scream, "You people just made this idiotic recording, and you're acting like it's real!  Are you crazy, or just stupid?"  But I didn't, because yelling at a video clip would make my family members ask the same question about me.

All of this, of course, is not to say that the Hum may not exist.  There are peculiar sounds in the world, many of them without a current explanation, and not all of which have proven impossible to detect.  An unexplained hum in Auckland, New Zealand, for example, was actually captured in a recording.  It is an acoustic signal that peaks at 56 hertz, near the bottom of the range of audibility for most people, and has yet to be explained.  But this makes it all the more odd that the Taos Hum hasn't been detected on sound equipment, much less recorded -- the Unsolved Mysteries people made it sound like making recording devices detect in that range is extremely difficult, when in fact it isn't hard at all.  A typical cassette recorder isn't very sensitive in that range, no; but with professional recording equipment, it shouldn't be a problem.

Another problem is how few people actually report hearing it.  Even a website that clearly considers the Hum to be real, and suggests as an explanation something that would be worthy of an episode of The X Files -- they imply that the Hum is either of supernatural origin, or caused by some secret government technology -- admits that only 2% of Taos residents can hear it.  Most people who've allegedly heard the phenomenon, when asked to listen to recordings of various low frequency sounds and identify which is closest, perk up when they hear recordings in the 50-80 hertz range, which is definitely in the audible range for most people with unimpaired hearing.  This raises the question of why, if it's as powerful as hearers say it is (some even say they can't sleep when the Hum is going on), everyone in Taos who isn't deaf hasn't reported the phenomenon.

Still, 2% is enough people that it deserves an explanation.  I tend to lean toward the idea that it's some form of tinnitus, combined with a dose of confirmation bias -- in this case, accepting an appealing lack of an explanation, and interpreting further anecdotal reports as evidence of its being some kind of grand mystery.  Once you think that the low-pitched ringing in your ears is a real phenomenon that is audible by others, you (1) pay more attention to it, and (2) become more and more convinced that it's true every time it subsequently happens.

I also must add, however, that I've been to Taos, and not only did I not hear any humming noise, I was immediately struck by the fact that there seemed to be an inordinately large number of Purveyors of Woo-Wooness -- Tarot card readers, palm readers, sellers of crystals, and metaphysical book stores.  Even at the time, before I'd ever heard of the Hum, it seemed to me a population of people who were primed to interpret everything with a mystical twist.

Of course, I could be wrong.  It's been known to happen.  After all, the Auckland Hum was shown to be a real phenomenon, and researchers haven't been able to find anything that explains it.  There are lots of unexplained noises in the world -- the most famous being the Bloop, which has actually been recorded by subs.  Of course, with the Bloop, there's a perfectly rational explanation; it's the noise made by Cthulhu snoring.  You think I'm joking.  Apparently the most common projected origin for the Bloops recorded by subs is right near the spot where H. P. Lovecraft said, in The Call of Cthulhu, stands the majestic sunken city of R'lyeh, where the octopoid god lies snoozing peacefully.  This fact should put the quietus on storming in there with subs and recording equipment.  It's not that I'm for impeding the progress of science, mind you; it's just that we ought to be careful.  Cthulhu, as far as I've heard, is not a morning person, and resents being awakened suddenly.  He also tends to wake up hungry, and with a serious case of morning breath.

On the other hand, honestly demands that I mention that in the case of the Bloop, there's a more likely explanation than the snoring of aquatic Elder Gods.  Just last year, some scientists over at NOAA found pretty good evidence that the Bloop is the sound of Antarctic ice sheets breaking up, distorted by being transmitted for long distances underwater.  Which is kind of a relief.  As interesting as the Lovecraftian pantheon is, I'd prefer that they weren't real, given the frequency with which his main characters had run-ins with Yog-Sothoth and Nyarlathotep et al. and ended up missing valuable limbs.

But I digress.

Assuming the Taos Hum actually is a real, external phenomenon, and isn't just a case of collective tinnitus or a resonance generated by a critical mass of woo-woos, it definitely deserves some more careful exploration.  I'd volunteer, but it's getting kind of late in the year, and Taos is one place in the United States that is even colder and snowier in the winter than upstate New York.  So I think any investigative team I lead will have to wait until spring.  Call me a wuss, but freezing my ass off listening for a sound that only 2% of people can hear anyway doesn't sound that inviting.  So I'm not planning on a trip to Taos any time soon, and if you're a Taos resident, you'll just have to deal with it for the time being.  I'll do what I can on my next visit, but until then, you'll just have to hum along or else ignore it.