Frequently asked questions

You may be perceiving The Hum — a worldwide reported low-frequency sound. Human sensitivity to frequencies below ~100 Hz varies enormously between people, so a real physical sound can be clearly audible to you and inaudible to your family. It typically stands out at night when background noise drops. You are not imagining it, and you are in the company of an estimated 2–4 % of the population.

It can be either — and an honest test helps: tinnitus usually follows you everywhere identically and often has a higher pitch (ringing, hissing). The Hum is typically a very deep tone (like a distant idling engine), often changes with location or direction of your head, may have pauses and interruptions, and some hearers can mask it with other low sounds. If the sound changes when you travel or stops in some places, an external or environmental component is likely. A hearing check with an ENT specialist is still a sensible first step.

Most hearers describe a deep, monotonous hum or drone — like a truck or generator idling far away, or a subwoofer playing behind several walls. Our founder describes it as a steady deep tone with irregular, unsynchronized breaks: sometimes it drones for minutes, sometimes it cuts out after a short while. Listen to the sound sample on our home page and compare.

Sometimes — but ordinary phone microphones roll off exactly where the Hum lives (below ~80 Hz), and their noise floor is high. Serious attempts use low-noise measurement microphones, geophones or infrasound sensors, long recordings and spectrogram analysis. Our Research section describes hardware that has worked for community members, and our long-term goal is a network of synchronized stations that can triangulate the source.

Wind turbines do produce low-frequency noise and are a legitimate local nuisance in some places. But the Hum was documented decades before large wind farms existed (Bristol, 1970s), and it is reported in regions with no turbines within a hundred kilometres. A local wind farm can contribute to what you hear — it cannot explain the worldwide phenomenon.

There is no evidence the sound itself damages the body. The suffering is real though: persistent low-frequency sound disturbs sleep and concentration, and evolution likely wired us to treat deep rumbles as danger signals — our ancestors felt a low rumble before they saw the predator or the earthquake. Chronic alertness is exhausting. Good sleep strategies, masking sounds, and knowing you are not alone measurably help.

On every inhabited continent. Famous documented cases include Taos (New Mexico), Windsor (Ontario), Bristol and Largs (UK) and Auckland (New Zealand). Our map collects reports from Slovakia, Czechia, Hungary, Greece and beyond — the same character of sound reported by people who have never spoken to each other.

Honestly: nobody has proven it yet. Candidate explanations include industrial and infrastructure sources (pipelines, compressors), ocean microseisms, atmospheric phenomena and heightened individual sensitivity — each fits some cases and fails others. That open question is the reason this portal exists: collect clean data, build synchronized detectors, and follow the evidence wherever it leads.