Low frequency faint noise at night

“Unless it’s tinnitus…”

Welcome to my world. Yeah, one often doesn’t notice it until it gets very quiet.

I’ve had mild tinnitus for a long time. Comes and goes and sounds exactly like crickets. The crickets can actually help me fall asleep.

Face it, Jerry, you’re getting old. Tinnitus is fairly common among old people like you.

“An excuse to get a really good mic (and a recording oscilloscope app for your phone) and to go hiking in a lot of places world-wide to gather data.”

great idea

For centuries people though elephants were essentially silent. some decades ago a researcher recorded a herd of elephants over 24 hours. NOthing. On her way home in the airplane she started the tape again and accidentally sped it up. Suddenly she was hearing the elephants! They make sounds that are too low for humans to hear. But communicate they did, at a very low frequency. speeding up the tape brought their sounds into audible range.

Maybe Jerry’s hearing hidden herds of elephants wandering the mountains.

“The Hum” sounds different in different areas.  If the signature is the same everywhere that’s quiet enough, its probably you.  You could get a hearing test in a sound proof booth, they’re pretty quiet, and if you hear it there call a priest.

To measure in the field, a spectrum analyzer app.   This is probably the best one ( I used to be an audio designer) but with its flexibility comes some opportunity to screw up the settings https://apps.apple.com/app/id490078884

This one is simpler but has less resolution and less knobs to twiddle which may be necessary to catch a low level and low frequency sound: https://apps.apple.com/app/id355396114

I use them both, they’re good

Make sure your mic has low frequency response to 20Hz, lower if possible.  Some mics roll off the low frequencies outside the vocal range (~ 60-80 Hz), to reduce background noise, but that’s what you want to catch.

Good luck!  LMK if you want me to put in a word in at my parish ;)

I am not getting old!

I refuse to!!!

My wife says I am hard of hearing because when she talks to me I say “what?”

I keep telling her it’s selective hearing loss.

She always turns way up the TV volume.  I claim it’s causing my ears to ring and turn it down.

When I worked in audio we called that selective hearing loss “the nag notch”, a long time ago…

great idea David.  I didn’t see those two apps (on my android) but I downloaded another, Spectroid by Carl Reinke.  That’s really cool.  I will now have to go up in the wilderness to try it out.

I used to design spectral analysis hardware and software for sonar.  Wow, on Spectroid you can change the window function, the FFT size,…

Brenda is now asking me what’s wrong with me, making sounds into my phone to watch the spectrum

My wife says I am hard of hearing because when she talks to me I say “what?”

I keep telling her it’s selective hearing loss.

She always turns way up the TV volume.  I claim it’s causing my ears to ring and turn it down.

Wouldn’t hurt to get a hearing test. Hearing slowly degrades. A few years ago the Idester chewed me out on a backpacking trip, telling me I was inconsiderate to others by not taking care of my hearing loss. Some of the best advice I ever got.

If you need hearing aids, the selective hearing (an advantage with wives) is easily restored — just remove them.

I have really sensitive hearing, but I don’t normally hear what you are describing. However, I recently noticed that I could hear a train traveling along a RR track, from a campsite 11 miles away. It wasn’t a clear line of sight,  loads of mountains, trees, river, etc. and yet I could clearly hear it. My fellow campers couldn’t hear it at all. Some times when I am camping, I have a hard time not waking up to bird or animal noises in the night. One of the things I like about remote campsites is the lack of machine noise – no refrigerators, fans, air conditioners, motors, etc. But it’s never “quiet” – always something is making sound.

there are a lot of android microphones but none of them show their frequency range, just things like battery life, stories from “influencers” about how great they are,…

Jerry, you have tinnitus. It’s extremely common. I’ve run into this before. People will believe anything but that. Especially musicians! You mention that your wife ‘claims” you are constantly asking “what?”. Think about this. who knows you better?

Maybe your tinnitus sounds like that well known river in Egypt flowing along?

Still, if you’re in denial, I still think the idea of invisible elephant herds rumbling through the wilderness, trying to connect with you, is the best fantasy explanation.

I downloaded this “hearing test”.  It has a background noise + some spoken words.  The volume of the spoken words is gradually decreased.  I was able to distinguish the words down to the lower limit of the test.

I asked my doctor about it once.  He held up a tuning fork to my ear, which I could hear, so he said I was fine.  I kind of got the feeling it was one male to another conspiring against their wives : )

“Selective hearing loss”, for me, is where I’m just focused on one task and ignore extraneous sounds.  Like if there was a lion creeping up on me about to pounce.

I once worked in psychoacoustics but now have pretty strong tinnitus (autotoxic reaction to medication), so hearing loss is a pet topic

I don’t think that low level test would tell you if you have low frequency hearing damage.  Sound gets masked by adjacent or overlapping frequencies & being able to make out what people say is generally > ~ 400Hz, not < 100Hz.  Low frequency tinnitus won’t generally mask speech perception.  That noise cancelling headphone test I mentioned is probably your best way to find out if you have it.

One pretty reliable symptom of general hearing loss is a higher than average sensitivity to the “cocktail party effect”, having trouble making out speech in noisy environments.  If this is getting worse, its a pretty sure sign

I have that as well.  I try to make it fun for my family when I can’t make out something by repeating something close but goofy.  They seem to appreciate it

I sleep like a log with good ear plugs on trail (missed a bear’s visit one year…) and find they give me some comfort from the tinnitus

AFAIK the cocktail part effect mainly involves the loss of high frequencies.

Low frequency tinnitus? Maybe, but maybe not. Study methods include what you could call a partial self-test — one that can in some cases imply tinnitus:

https://www.tinnitusjournal.com/articles/manifestations-of-a-lowfrequency-sound-of-unknown-origin-perceived-worldwide-also-known-as-the-hum-or-the-taos-hum.html

That test I took would detect the cocktail party effect.  I don’t have that problem.  To the level of confidence a free app on your would give which is not much.  If the test showed I did have that problem that might be more reliable.  Maybe more false negatives than false positives.

” The presence of at least one of the three features is typical of the Hum for 73% hearers. The three features are statistically significant dependent on each other. Hum-oscillations are typically influenced by head rotation and by sounds and are most likely located in the semicircular canals and the cochlea. Therefore, for the majority of hearers, the Hum may represent a rare form of tinnitus that has nothing to do with external sounds. The remaining group doesn’t experience any feature of a typical hearer.”

I have another thing to try – rotate my head and see if it changes the sound.  And see if other sounds change it.

There’s going to be frickin rain in the next week so maybe I’ll have to wait for that to pass.  Some of it related to that hurricane.

If you find a hum spot in summer, you can eliminate ground transmission by rechecking on winter overnight — after a foot or two of base has been established followed by a storm delivering foot or two of cold powder has passed — likely any year near Portland. The powder snow will absorb any ground vibrations.

If you find a hum spot in summer, you can eliminate ground transmission by rechecking on winter overnight — after a foot or two of base has been established followed by a storm delivering foot or two of cold powder has passed — likely any year near Portland. The powder snow will absorb any ground vibrations.

Or…you could get your hearing checked by a reputable audiologist. All of these self tests etc. are…interesting. I guess I’m an old fashioned guy. Go to a friggin’ audiologist and get tested in a sound booth. It’s always a good thing to have someone with credentials who’s not yourself testing you with accredited instruments. Someone who’s done this a thousand times and isn'[t relying on wikipedia to inform them.

Did you say you weren’t on any meds Jerry? I was on a medication this past year, and developed quite the annoying tinnitus. I didn’t even connect the sound with the meds, and  I went and had my hearing tested. I was triumphant to tell my husband that in fact, my hearing was pretty near perfect and that he mumbles a lot, causing me to constantly ask “what?” You can definitely tell the age of members of this group by the marital squabbles. Or maybe it’s the longevity of our marriages.

The doc said there was no cure for the tinnitus and get used to it. But a month or two later, I went off the medication (for other reasons), and the sound is completely gone. Such a relief. It’s really and truly gone.

I completely agree that people who refuse to wear hearing aids even with a diagnosed problem, are a nuisance. I get it if you can’t afford them, but just refusing because you won’t acknowledge that your body is wearing away, ensures your future isolation – in every social circumstance. You might think that’s what you want, but you really don’t.

Jscott:

The tests do not usually go below 250 Hz whereas “The Hum” is lower in many cases. Equipment calibration is unlikely to be accurate for the frequencies involved in a medical setting. So a garden variety hearing test is not meaningful in Jerry’s case.

Well, the reason I recommended a visit to a hearing test center is because the booth should be quiet and isolated enough enough so he can hear if its tinitus or not, but the hearing test itself is not required and incidental, I agree.  I should have made that more clear

My ENT told me that tinnitus is a good indicator of hearing loss. So is your wife telling you that you say ‘what?’ all the time.  But Jerry may have been making a joke with this last. tinnitus always affects hearing adversely.

Of course, listening to folks on a backpacking forum that have never met Jerry and tell him they know the answer is one approach. Or a hearing test by a certified doctor with a degree and professional equipment might be another approach. Hmmmm…..what to do? The truth is I don'[t know if Jerry has tinnitus or hearing loss. But reporting a hum that no one else hears suggests…something.

So, sure, maybe Jerry is hearing ultra low frequencies from an unknown source that no one else hears. He might consider a psychiatric evaluation after skipping the hearing test that he doesn’t need.

Jerry, good idea.  My earpods made an annoying clicking while walking so I replaced them with a new pair & tested with nothing playing.  No improvement…then I realized the new pair wasn’t plugged in.  My ear was clicking on every hard left step, all on its own, when my head rotated a certain angle.  Senior moments*2 (I’m way too young for this!)

jscott, the hearing test won’t test for tinitus directly, only its possible repercussions on minimum audible level or speech perception, but without knowing the true root cause if those tests tank.  So a hearing test is right on for marital bliss in general but to get to the root cause of hearing the low frequency tone, you need a better test: go somewhere isolated (e.g. audition booth) and listen or stick on noise cancelling headphones.  Sorry, I’m re-repeating myself now

The Wikipedia article on “the hum” sums it up pretty good.

Many cases of people hearing a hum from industrial sites far away with higher frequencies filtered out.

If you have hearing loss it can increase dementia symptoms.  Definitely get a hearing aid for your own sake if nothing else.

I don’t have hearing loss because I can hear TV at low volume.  And hear other faint sounds.

It’s possible I have tinnitus but that’s usually higher frequency as previously mentioned