The Hum

On quiet.

By Gabriela McBride

Illustration by Kathleen Halley-Segal

The sonic experience of New York City is one of constant inundation. Amongst cars honking at freshly green traffic lights, jackhammers clanking, and the bangs of early-morning-scaffolding construction, moments that might begin to resemble silence are few and far between. The bit of me that resents being raised in the relentless cacophony of New York City yearns for the quiet and stillness of wide open outdoor spaces. Even when I seek out and find them, sometimes the quiet is not deep enough. On a hike this autumn I stopped in the middle of a trail, wishing that the crunch of the leaves below my feet would stop drowning out the quiet, as if something were hiding in the silence. 

I stumbled upon the Taos Hum with three friends at midnight on the Chambers Street A-C station on our way uptown. An old newsstand was humming: Not in the way something broken and electric might buzz, but with an intentionality that stopped me in my tracks. I scanned the metallic box for some indication of its message or meaning. A QR code my friend eventually spotted on the side of the structure lead to a site with the heading–Subway Vendor Kiosk, 7.1 Spatial Audio System / CHAMBERS HUM is a public sound art installation by WPZSCH (Emmett Palaima, Nathan Sherman) produced in collaboration with the MTA Vacant Unit Activation Program.

What followed on the website was something of a Chambers Hum manifesto, detailing its aim of creating a space within the city for connecting with a “universal harmonic order.” The concept of this Hum” is a reference to the New Mexico Taos Hum: a phenomenon where, in the vast soundlessness of the high desert town of Taos, a large number of people consistently reported hearing a low vibration. 

The Autumn 1995 newsletter of The Acoustical Society of America ECHOES explained that from their measurements near Taos, “there are no known acoustic signals that might account for the hum, nor are there any seismic events that might explain it.” They did find that most test subjects also identified an acoustic beating against a reference tone, something which indicates the vibrations of two sounds interacting, implying there was a second tone, or “hum.”  

Palaima and Sherman, the architects of the Chamber’s Hum, explain their theory about The Hum in Taos: “Those who are attuned can perceive the hum, and attunement comes from a lack of distraction. In the solitude of the desert, in a state of sublime peace and boredom, the universal order reveals itself.” 

The middle of downtown New York City then, is not the first place one would expect to encounter a meaningful experience with quiet. But a subway station, subsumed in the depth of the earth, is a realm that the sounds of the city have difficulty penetrating. This type of silence creates a vacuum in which our ears become uncomfortable with the absence, and our brains open up, looking for something to hear. That is where Palaima and Sherman’s vacant unit found us, in the depths of the subway, late at night, in the surreal, liminal, pensive space not unlike a desert across the country. 

We waited by the towering humming metal box for ten or so minutes for the predictably delayed late-night-A. In the tunnel, my friends and I all fell into a naturally quiet stasis. Somehow, without discussion, all of our ears tuned into the Hum. Perhaps the Hum, this hum or Taos Hum or another hum, is what I have been looking for in quiet. Whether the hum in Taos is psychosomatic or not, it exists as a shared experience for some, in one way or another. While I can’t speak to the universal harmonic order, I’m more convinced than ever that there is something to be found in the quiet, internal or external, within or without, above or below ground.