Dynamo Hums
There are now many places around the globe where people experience constant humming sounds emanating from the earth or atmosphere. (Taos Hum, Kokomo Hum, Orford Hum....). Perhaps at certain locations, the earth reaches some kind of resonant frequency and is "feeding back". We aren't just hearing things as we do with our ears, as sonic perception with the ears is incomplete, or has flaws and can create artifacts.
The world is mysterious in some way to all sentient beings. It's even mysterious in the sense that we can't even know the endless way in which sentience is incomplete: For example, dogs are missing sensory organs that create mystery for them, whereas it is taken for granted in other species. Birds can sense the earth's magnetic field and we cannot, which may produce artifacts for them, the equivalent in humans such as the hearing of humming sounds, or things like booming sand.
Composers and songwriters fully realize that music must first exist in the silence in the mind in order for it to be shaped in the real world. Sometimes musical ideas emerge in dreams as earworms; They loop in your mind, as "the pink elephant": You can't not hear them.
When I'm working on (non-ambient) music, chorus ideas can be an earworm for days. This is both a good and bad thing: It's good in the sense that it helps you in the incubation period, but the earworm (the technical term is Involuntary Musical Imagery or the one I like "cognitive itch") itself can corrupt creativity. The fact that a song chorus vamps and repeats in your head affect the actual composition. Musicians have almost an ethical responsibility to avoid creating earworms, but they exist naturally in pop music. Even if you like the idea, a repeating mind-vamp will drive you mad. Conversely, repeated phrases (bhajans, mantras), are a way to calm the mind of over-thought.
As acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton is quoted in the excellent article Everything Is Getting Louder, there is a certain spiritual purity in complete silence, "You are not echoing billboards. You are not echoing modern songs." I don't agree with this entirely. Music is hardwired through language and through the singing of words and playing rhythms inherent in those words. Once we "heard" music in our heads, we still haven't been able to un-hear it. The noise of one's own thoughts can silence any silence, yet happens without sound waves. This happens with visual noise as well, and the reason we become inured to bad architecture or bad design as a way to stop cognitive itching.
When I compose ambient music, I typically strive to categorize sound and move the focal point around. This is how you can contextualize what is considered "unwanted" noise, or some element that isn't usually categorized as music. This is easier to do in electronic music where you can sort this into individual tracks and mix them down, but symphonic composers explored this in the early 20th century as a way to use mechanical noise in the environment as the foreground element as pure mimesis--mirroring what the world was beginning to sound like with the sound of cars and machines, steam engines, factories, etc. It was essentially sound design but we didn't think of it that way then.
Sound design is more scientific than it is musical, having to do more with acoustics than melody and harmony. But they are really inseparable; sound is joined at the hip with music--or at least logic that could be understood as being musical. In a way, Steven Pinker's comment that music is "auditory cheesecake" is partially true, but it is delicious and we crave it, as much as we (should) crave the sounds of nature or "nutritious" sounds that are good for our well-being. In the sequence of events in the evolution from pure sound to music, first there was the ability to hear sound, then the emergence of language, then prosody, then music, then modernity, then machinery, then noise, then noise in a musical context. Lots of us like music that makes us anxious--in a soothing way. We don't necessarily have to use nature sounds or silence to calm us down. Even loud speed metal is soothing for those that like that kind of auditory cheesecake.
I love the feel of chained locomotives passing by. It rattles your chest in almost a soothing way. This is why Sunn O)))) is so compelling to listeners: You can bathe in the sound as if in an immersion tank. This is the reason we love resonant bass frequencies so much because it has power without shrieking to the ears. The obsession with mysterious humming perhaps is a way to attempt to fill in the gaps in perception that evolution left out for humans. Music serves this function as well.
I have personally not experienced Hum. But if it had pitch, I'd try to use it as music.
While watching this short documentary ‘The Hum’: The Unexplained Noise 2% of People Can Hear, I was wondering how one could use it in a musical context. The one they used in the film as Foley had pitch, and could be used as a drone. In this piece from Eno's On Land album Unfamiliar Wind (Leeks Hills), he begins with a pulsing hum.
Drones and hums are also used abstractly, as in Glen Campbell's Wichita Lineman, expressed in both the mood of the music, and in the lyric: "whine/line", also metaphorically as being "on the line" or being available and connected electronically through a wire.
Music is elementally spiritual and mysterious, which is why we entertain the notion that it can have ghostly qualities, and the world presents them to us to process.
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