The Hum

After a week here I told Toby that this was it, the place I wanted to be, and we should save to buy a house here (see: the whiplashing manner in which I make life decisions). For the price of a tiny two-bedroom under the flight path in Leichhardt, Sydney, we’d be able to buy a four bedroom in a quiet street with a seven-minute cycle into the city centre. Toby would have a garden to really make his own. We’d be able to paint the walls and hell, even knock some down. We would have to save a fair amount of money to get there, but I finally felt like I knew what I was working towards.

Our little corner of Cambridge is quaint, with a little deli on the corner selling cheeses and flowers, and hydrangeas and wisteria in front gardens, lovely neighbours who stop for a chat. When it’s sunny people flock here from every part of Cambridge to sit on the river banks and and picnic and, if they’re brave, swim – although the levels of e.coli are six times higher than safe limits, so it’s not wise. 

It’s quiet too, except for the foot traffic coming and going from the meadows, drunk posh college students arguing about whether Jonty or Boffy had should give Minty a piggy-back after she twisted her ankle or some such. 

Even Toby’s mother, who has lived her whole life in the English countryside, commented on how quiet it is. But that’s the thing about the countryside, it’s actually quite noisy: all those lawn mowers and chain saws and bird scarers (propane gas canons that sound like gunfire – not, to my knowledge, a thing in Australia but very much a thing here). 

It started about ten days after we moved into our new place. Lying in bed at night, I heard what I thought was an engine idling. But it didn’t go away. 

I turned to Toby. 

“Do you hear that?” I asked. 

“What?” he replied. 

“That droning noise.”

He turned to look at me, shook his head a little.

“Do you seriously not hear it?”

He shrugged, turned over, went to sleep.

The noise stayed.

Perhaps it was too quiet? Because at night, or when I was concentrating on my work, I’d be driven to distraction by this buzzing noise. I’d lay awake in the early hours of the morning, trying and failing to tune it out. I’d lived for years next to a busy Sydney thoroughfare and then under the flight path, pausing conversations and Netflix shows to wait for a plane to pass over – so low it would seem you could touch it - before starting again. 

I could only hear the noise inside the house, and it was worst at night. It wasn’t electronic; I could hear it when the power was off. Outside, there were other noises that would drown it out. Birds twittering, that kind of thing. Inside, all that noise was dampened, such that all I could hear was the drone. 

“You seriously can’t hear that?” I’d say to Toby, increasingly distressed. It wasn’t just that the noise was maddening; it was all the more upsetting knowing that no-one else could hear it. “I don’t want to hear it,” Toby said, wisely enough. It’s like when someone screws up their face and says “Can you smell that?” – it’s never a good idea to inhale. 

We live about 2 kilometres from a major highway, and Toby thought perhaps that was what I was hearing, and I was just too tuned in to it. But the drone was too constant – it never changed pitch, the frequency barely varied. I realised that if I listened to music it would stop, so I would pop the radio on first thing when I woke up. I always wanted a house full of music anyway. But music was too distracting when I was working, so I went hunting for some binaural beats or what have you. I played some pink noise and found that it sounded exactly like what I was hearing. 

Everything else here was wonderful, but now I wasn’t sure I could stay. The noise would keep me awake at night. For years I’ve slept with ear plugs – a habit I picked up when I lived in a dormitory, and which I’ve found it impossible to kick. But the ear plugs wouldn’t dampen the drone. Would I have to flee due to something that was, for all I could tell, only in my head?

Like any good hypochondriac, I did some googling. That’s where I learned about The Hum. 

The Hum was first reported in Bristol, England, in the 1970s but people have reported hearing The Hum all around the world. There are all sorts of theories as to its cause: waves, lightning strikes, mobile phone towers. In Canada, reports of a hum were finally resolved when a steel plant shut down.

People report feeling nauseated by The Hum – I felt the same. In a documentary for The Atlantic, one man says his brain feels like it’s being squeezed; he says his dog’s personality has changed entirely, presumably from also hearing The Hum. 

Sound has long been used as a weapon. The Aztecs had something called the Death Whistle, a skull-shaped ceramic pipe that, when blown into, sounds like a throng of people screaming. Iraqi POWs were tortured with the Barney theme song played on repeat. In what’s become known as Havana syndrome, US diplomats have reported hearing a painful sound in their ear, followed by dizziness, nausea, difficulty concentrating. The symptoms lasted for months: insomnia, problems with balance. At first it was dismissed because scientists and doctors could find no cause for the symptoms – but recent investigations have linked it to a Russian military intelligence unit using “non-lethal acoustic weapons”. 

I’m not saying I was the subject of a weapon – what I’m saying it that I understand how sound can be used in such a way. How you could send someone mad with it. Break down their will.

There’s something especially isolating about being afflicted with a little-known, misunderstood condition. I appreciate medical science just as much as the next person who enjoys not having polio. But the field of medicine can be awfully quick to dismiss anything it doesn’t understand. Or maybe I was one skin lesion away from self-diagnosing with Morgellons. 

Toby said I should go see an audiologist, just to be sure. I was going all-in on The Hum, and he wanted a second opinion. I wrote to an audiologist to make an appointment, and waited.

One day I started filling in the form on The World Hum Map and Database Project, to report my experiences. “If you shake your head very briefly, or exhale loudly, does the noise stop for about half a second and then quickly return?” it asks. I tried it. Huh, I thought. For half a second, it stopped.  I tried yawning – again it stopped, ever so briefly. 

And then I stuck my fingers in my ears. In my right ear I could feel a muscle spasming, and, as I pressed my finger against it, releasing. 

I didn’t need to move. It wasn’t The Hum. I had – have – low frequency tinnitus. I’d just never been anywhere quiet enough to notice.

As soon as I figured out what it was, it started getting better. Something about knowing it was all in my head, admittedly physically rather than mentally, allowed me to tune it out. It’s still there, it just doesn’t bother me as much. If it’s bad i’ll stick my pinkie finger in my ear (it’s just in my right ear) and wiggle it around, and it eases up a little. And this week we’re going to make an offer on a house.