Fellow UK-based<\/a> coastal communities like Southampton, Swansea and Plymouth began suffering from the sound too, as did individuals in London, before reports of cases across the US<\/a> emerged in the 1990s. <\/p>\n Residents of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Norway have all encountered this low-frequency buzzing sound in their ears as well, which has finally led to a scientific<\/a> study.<\/p>\n As many as four percent of the world’s population now live with The Hum; for some it is irritably manageable, for others the ringing brings physical discomfort into their lives.<\/p>\n Acoustic pollution, technology<\/a>, traffic, naturally-occurring environmental sounds (like wind blowing through landscapes or ocean waves meeting the shore) and even alien activity have all been bandied around as proposed triggers.<\/p>\n In 2024, the BBC<\/a> even dramatised the phenomenon in a series titled The Listeners – starring Rebecca Hall, Prasanna Puwanarajah, Ollie West and Amr Waked.<\/p>\n Per Science Daily<\/a>, a new journal<\/a> put together by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology professor Markus Drexl made some fascinating conclusions after investigating 28 people from Germany with the hearing issue.<\/p>\n Drexl and his team tested whether those who can hear it have either exceptional low-frequency perception or measurable sounds produced inside their ears.<\/p>\n “We know that there are people who hear low-frequency sounds that can actually be measured, even if other people don’t hear them,” said the professor.<\/p>\n “But it’s not so easy to find the source of these sound waves, because it’s a struggle to localise low-frequency sounds.”<\/p>\n In the end, having considered the two hypotheses, the studiers decided that many of The Hum’s so-called victims are experiencing low-frequency tinnitus.<\/p>\n “Based on our results, although we haven’t ruled out cases of physical external sound sources, we suggest that subjective tinnitus in the low-frequency range is often the cause of hearing pulsations of low-frequency sound perceptions,” noted Drexl.<\/p>\n A tiny portion of The Hum’s hearers may boast unusually sensitive low-frequency hearing, though.<\/p>\n Symptoms of tinnitus <\/p>\n Tinnitus is a hearing condition where noise appears in one or both ears, or the head, when no external sound is apparent.<\/p>\n Symptoms include faint ringing or humming down the ear canal, or hissing, whistling and roaring. <\/p>\n Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters, Brian Johnson of AC\/DC, Pete Townshend of The Who, and the late Ozzy Osbourne of Black Sabbath all suffered from tinnitus due to their unique career paths as rockstars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A perplexing phenomenon known as ‘The Hum’ has seemingly been figured out by a team of researchers, 50…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":535374,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[134,111,139,69,147,145],"class_list":["post-535373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-health","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=535373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535373\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/535374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=535373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=535373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=535373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Four](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/aHR0cHM6Ly9ldS1pbWFnZXMuY29udGVudHN0YWNrLmNvbS92My9hc3NldHMvYmx0Y2Q3NGFjYzFkMGE5OWYzYS9ibHRkNjZkYWVh.webp\"\/)
Four percent of the world’s population can hear The Hum (Sch\u00f6ning\/ullstein bild via Getty Images)<\/p>\n