Background hums and buzzes affect human behavior, researcher finds

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Have you ever stopped and listened to the background sounds in a room you are in? The hum of the ventilation?

While most of the time we are barely aware of these sounds, Arthur Jinyue Guo, a researcher at the RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Rhythm, Time and Motion, has revealed that they nevertheless affect our behavior. "There seems to be more in this than what most of us are aware of," he says. Guo recently came across what may be a fascinating example when his colleague, music professor David Loberg Code, came to Norway to work.

Back home in Michigan, Code has a very strong sense of absolute pitch: He can usually identify the name of a pitch—and sing a given pitch—quite quickly and without external assistance. When he came to Norway, Code realized that his absolute pitch was lower than usual. It was suddenly unreliable.

For the music researchers at RITMO, including Code himself, it became a puzzle: Why was this happening? Could there be something different about indoor environments in Europe? To investigate the effects of background sounds, Guo and his colleagues have collected audio recordings from places such as kitchens, living rooms and railway stations across the world, as well as video recordings tracking people's movements in those same spaces.

Using machine-learning algorithms that he developed himself, Guo identified patterns in the data that reveal how we are unconsciously affected by the sounds around us. "One of our findings was that the direction a sound comes from affects us. For example, it matters whether a ventilation system is in the middle of the ceiling, on one side of the room, or perhaps on both sides.

We saw that people unconsciously moved toward the part of the room the sound was coming from, even when they had been told to stand still," Guo says. What might seem like an unengaging sound—the sound of a ventilation system—can therefore have an attractive effect on us. But what does this have to do with absolute pitch?