What on Earth is that sound? Mystery noise plagues Highland Park residents

Steve Orr | Democrat and Chronicle

Show Caption Hide Caption What's that hum? It has some Highland Park residents on edge "I cannot live like this," says resident Lora Dean. She, and others, are trying to find out where the mystery sound is coming from.

Things go bump in the night. We all hear them.

But how would you feel if the bump never stopped?

People in Rochester’s Highland Park neighborhood first heard their puzzling, annoying bump in the night late last summer. It’s continued off and on ever since.

The low-pitched mechanical buzzing, most audible at night when other sounds die away, is leaving those who hear it grasping for an explanation.

They call it a distraction. They say it keeps them awake at night. When the sound erupts, they can’t escape it.

"If you go inside and hide or turn on some white noise, you have some relief. But as soon as you walk outside your house to do any little chore or to enjoy the weather, here it comes again," said Lora Dean, the first person to post about the sound in the Highland Park neighborhood Facebook group last year.

"And it never stops.”

While not everyone in the Highland Park neighborhood hears the sound, and some don’t believe it’s real, a dozen residents have posted on Facebook that they’ve noticed it. Dean said she knows of about two dozen fellow-hearers.

There's also no way to be certain they're all hearing the same sound — but analysis of audio recordings made at three different times in two different places in the neighborhood found they contain precisely the same tone.

That sound, residents say, is not constant. It appears and then goes away, following no obvious pattern. But when it’s there, it’s there.

More: The Hum: Global phenomenon heard by some in Rochester region

“Last summer, I heard it for several nights in a row. It got to the point where if you focused on it, it could make you crazy,” said Lindsay Cray, who lives about six blocks from Dean in the center of the Highland Park neighborhood.

“It sounds like a low-pitched vibration. It goes underneath all the other ambient noise you hear in the city,” she said.

“It’s maddening. Once you hear it, it won’t go away.”

Some have suggested that residents are picking up the local manifestation of a phenomenon known as the Hum — a deep malevolent thrum that has vexed people in every corner of the world.

Dean believes what she hears is something different. It’s higher-pitched than the Hum, less like a guttural diesel and more like a droning vacuum cleaner or a leaf blower.

But what is it? She has no idea.

“The bottom line is, I don’t care what it is. I honestly don’t care,” said Dean, who lives off South Goodman Street. “I just want to identify it and get rid of it.”

'Where the hell did it come from?'

When you hear the creak of a floorboard downstairs, you grab your flashlight and investigate. Detect a skittering, scratching noise inside the closet? You screw up your courage and open the door.

So it’s been in the Highland Park neighborhood, where Dean and a few others have wandered the streets trying to track the source of their perplexing drone.

Dean said she’s gone on walks where she’s heard it at one spot only to have it disappear when she moves a half-block away.

But she’s never been successful in locating a source by moving around so that the sound becomes louder. The volume doesn’t seem to vary from one place to the next, Dean said.

"It's weird. Whatever it is, it's weird," she said.

A number of residents suggested the source was Highland Hospital’s air-handling equipment, which is clearly audible along Rockingham Street.

But that sound doesn’t seem to carry. The same is true of droning from vent fans outside several neighborhood restaurants.

Dissonant power lines have been brought up, but no one’s found any. A new electric substation just west of the neighborhood was checked and crossed off the list.

Malfunctioning street light? Worn-out air conditioner? Laboring corner-store ice cooler?

All were suggested and all were nixed because their noises seemed too localized. They couldn’t account for a sound that’s been heard in every corner of the neighborhood.

The most common suggestion was a generator at a construction site. Cray, the resident who was pestered by the sound last summer, was sure at one point she was hearing a portable generator.

“But there was no construction, there was no heavy-duty machinery nearby,” she said.

“So where the hell did it come from?”

Song in the key of E4

Ming-Lun Lee hums a tone to himself and opens a virtual piano keyboard on his laptop.

He taps a key.

“E4,” he announces.

It was a small eureka moment. E4 — the piano key E just above Middle C — is very close to the tone of the Highland Park drone.

Lee, a computer scientist and a musician, is an assistant professor in the UR’s Audio and Music Engineering Program. At Democrat and Chronicle’s request, he analyzed recordings of drone sounds in the Highland Park neighborhood.

What he found was fascinating.

First, Lee examined a recording made by Dean on her back deck shortly after 12 midnight on May 1 and another made by a reporter in the same location at 7:40 p.m. on May 7.

Lee isolated the tone that was audible on those days, filtered out other sounds and increased the volume.

Voila! Both contained the exact same sound — a drone with a frequency between 315 and 320 hertz. Lee hummed the tone as he determined it was similar to E4 on the keyboard.

“They are very similar,” Lee said of the two recordings. “I think they have the same source.”

More: Decide for yourself!

As it happens, 315 and 320 hertz are frequencies that some practitioners of chakra meditation believe has healing properties, a claim that Dean might have trouble accepting.

Dean heard the enhanced recording and verified that the tone extracted by Lee was the same one she heard numerous times.

Cray and Kathryn Quinn Thomas, another resident who reported hearing the drone last year, both listened to Lee's enhancement and agreed it seemed to be the same sound they'd heard in the wild.

Next, Lee analyzed a recording made last November by a man who lives a 10-minute walk from Dean, at the neighborhood’s southern edge.

The sounds in that recording are more complex, and the droning tone is fainter. But when Lee analyzed it, he again found a distinct tone at about 315 Hz.

Could the three sounds be from the same source? Yes, Lee said, it’s certainly possible.

What is that source? Lee cannot say.

The air is full of droning, whirling, buzzing, rumbling sounds. Distinguishing one from another, and finding where it comes from, is difficult.

But Lee noted that low-frequency sounds do carry farther than higher-pitched ones.

So perhaps the source is something no one’s thought of, something farther away.

The power plant

Walk down East Henrietta Road by CityGate in the evening, or drive down the development’s access road, and you’re likely to hear a conspicuous humming sound.

It comes from a squat structure housing natural gas-fired turbines and generators that provide electricity and steam to Monroe Community Hospital.

Amid the daytime hustle and bustle, the engines’ throb isn't all that noticeable. But at night when things quiet down?

“That’s when you notice it. It’s a low-level humming sound. It’s not really annoying. It’s just there,” said Dan Hurley, vice president of the Upper Mt. Hope Neighborhood Association. “They’re not loud, but it carries. I live … a half-mile away, but I can hear it.”

The engines are 1½ to 2 miles from the Highland Park neighborhood. Could they possibly be the source of the sound that sound that annoys people there?

“It’s certainly worth looking into,” Hurley said.

Lee analyzed two recordings of the power plant’s audio output made by the Democrat and Chronicle, one on a mild evening and the other on a hot, humid day. The sound profiles were noticeably different, he said, meaning the plant has different operational modes and thus a changing audio output.

Monroe County owns the plant and a branch of Siemens AG runs it, but neither could provide someone who could discuss how much the plant's operation varies.

Neither recording made by the D&C contained a tone near 315 Hz, though one did give off a specific tone that showed up in the drone recording made by a neighbor last November.

Lee believes the plant is capable of generating the droning sound that residents detect, but does so only in certain operational modes. This would explain why people hear the annoying sound only intermittently.

The next time residents report the sound, he said, "we may want to go to the power plant first" to determine just what frequencies it's giving off at that moment. That could rule out the power plant as a suspect, or rule it in.

On, off. On off

One of the exasperating elements of the sound is that it seems to appear for a time, then disappear, then come back.

“It was late last summer, with our bedroom window open, around 3 a.m. It sounded like a deep hum, at a constant frequency, like a generator in the distance,” said Thomas, who lives about four blocks from Dean in the center of the Highland Park neighborhood. “We heard it on several nights, until the weather cooled off.”

She hasn't heard it since.

As winter set in, no one seemed to detect the Highland Park sound, which as yet has no name.

On Facebook, neighbors speculated the source was only active during warm weather. Others countered that it was like the tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear it.

“Did it just stay so low that you would never hear it in your home with the double-pane windows down? That I don’t know,” Dean said.

But now spring has begun, the sound is in the air again. Dean worries that her morning routine of coffee on her back deck faces ruin.

“As soon as I open the door, what will I hear? Dzzzzzzzzz. And I’ll have to go back inside. I’m not going to be able to enjoy my backyard.”

She resumed her masking tactics, listening to music on headphones while she gardens and running a white-noise machine at night in her bedroom.

It may be, though, that the drone has become quiescent again. No one has reported hearing it for several weeks, though Dean seems certain it will return again.

When it does, her intent is to ask the Highland Park, South Wedge and Swillburg neighborhood associations to poll their residents about the sound.

Lee, the professor who recommended making more recordings at the power plant, also suggested "a more systematic way to find the source or sources.

"I think that’s a good research topic. We can do some experiments," he said. He would love to deploy the highly sensitive microphones he uses in his research, and then analyze what they pick up.

Lee said the sound could be crowd-sourced — that as many neighborhood residents as possible be enlisted to hit the pavement when the sound is audible.

"We need more people to listen to the drone," he said. "People need to move around. I think that’s very important: 'Can you hear it here? Is it louder there?'”

Location data can be plotted on a map to look for a pattern.

Lee further recommended that crowd sourcers download a musical instrument tuner app and, when they hear the sound, hum the tone into their phone’s mic. The app will identify the note and pitch.

If everyone’s hearing the same tone, they’ll know they’re onto something.

Dean said that once the neighborhood residents and associations have done what they can, it might be appropriate to ask City Hall for help ferreting out the source of the sound.

Worldwide Hum

In the long history of the worldwide Hum, several municipalities and other government agencies have indeed commissioned studies to that bothersome sound.

In Rochester, the city noise ordinance prohibits “excessive noise,” which the code defines in part as persistent sounds that are audible at night over a wide area.

Highland Park’s drone would seem to fit.

City spokeswoman Jessica Alaimo declined to speculate about the drone or how officials would react to a request for help.

She did say, however, that city staff has fielded at least one complaint about an annoying, low-level sound.

Ironically, it came from the Highland Park neighborhood, and was tracked to a malfunctioning air conditioner. The problem was resolved, she said.

Could the solution this time around be so easy? So far, it hasn’t been.

The hearers say the sound is like an old song you hear on the radio and then can’t get out of your head.

“I cannot live like this. I just can’t. I don’t think anyone in this neighborhood should have to either,” Dean protested one recent evening. “It’s interfering with your lives and your enjoyment of your own property. And it’s everywhere and it gets under your skin and it drives you insane.

“I just want it to stop.”

SORR@Gannett.com