Jules Jones

Over the last couple of months, I've been noticing low frequency hum on and off, mostly at night but occasionally in the day. At first it was so quiet I thought it might be tinnitus. But for the last few days it's been 24/7 and loud enough to be noticeable even when I open the window to let in traffic noise to mask it. I'm pretty sure it's a major factor in my poor sleep the last few nights, and I now understand why at least one person was driven to suicide by the Bristol Hum.

I can't work with this going on; it's too distracting. And so I have resorted to a technique from my student days, when I was living in a building with people who thought that it was perfectly reasonable to have the top 40 on very loudly at all hours that it wasn't explicitly banned by the college, because the beautiful people never bothered to study, only spods did that. I have got out my CD of Gregorian chant which I bought years ago specifically as white noise to mask other people's taste in music, and put it in the laptop's CD drive.

The volume is even, the emotional tone is too, and I don't speak Latin so I don't listen to the words. It doesn't distract me, to the point where I have owned this CD for two decades and have no conscious idea what most of the tracks actually sound like because I tune them out. Bliss...

ETA: There's a hell of a lot of pseudoscience about LFN, but there's also a solid study on measuring LFN from the University of Salford done for Defra in 2005:
http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/noise/research/lowfrequency/pdf/nanr45-criteria.pdf
2003 literature survey for Defra: http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/noise/research/lowfrequency/pdf/lowfreqnoise.pdf