The Taos Hum: Do you hear what I hear?

By Larry Torres, Associate Professor UNM-Taos

It is well-known that certain animals can perceive tones whose pitch is too out of range for the rest of us. Dogs, for example, can hear and react to high-pitched whistles just a little above what humans can hear. In experiments using audiograms as means of assessment, mice, bats and beluga whales have been found to hear the highest range of pitches in terms of hertz and kilohertz.

Enter Taos, New Mexico where a growing number of residents and visitors are hearing a low-pitched sound that many describe as “a distant idling motor” or “an eternal DO note” on a musical scale. What makes these descriptions even more unusual is that the low pitched “hum” is heard more after sunset and in the middle of the night when men sleep and nature holds her nocturnal vigil.

Some of the ancient accounts of this area tell of ‘Nature holding counsel’ with her own as she resets her patterns of harmony every night. But now that Man has entered the equation, the patterns of harmony have been disrupted.

Many people have offered theories as to just why this Taos Hum is heard. Their ideas range anywhere from shifting wind patterns coming out of the Río Grande Canyon to electromagnetic vibrations emitted by Taos Mountain. Some attribute the Hum to low-flying alien spacecraft over the night skies to secret experiments in Los Alamos just down the canyon. All of these make for wonderful tales and tourist fodder. But now, let’s explore another possibility:

Taos is nestled deep within the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. Looming out of this range is a peak known as El Salto. It was this peak, reflecting the bright scarlet colors of the setting sun, that caused the first settlers in the valley to name the entire range for ‘The Blood of Christ’. It is called El Salto for the seven waterfalls that cascade down its side in summer and form frozen stalactites in the winter. The people of the village of Taos proudly say that the mountain baptizes the valley with its singing waters.

What makes El Salto unique in relation to the Taos Hum is that there are caves behind each one of the waterfalls. The caves are of different shapes and at different elevations. They tend to catch the sound of the cascading waters and echo it back into the valley much like the sound box on a colossal guitar tuned to geo-synchronous patterns.

The reason that most people hear only one low ‘hum’ has been explained by the idea that they are only standing at the lowest elevation. It would be like hearing a long, endless ‘DO’ on a musical scale. Mountain climbers who have taken the time to scale the falls though, report hearing another tone. This is like a ‘RE’, one note higher up in pitch. It seems that the higher one climbs, the wider the range of musical notes that are perceived.
 
A holy hermit named Giovanni Maria Agostini Justiniani who passed through Taos in the mid 1800s reported having climbed all the way to the top of El Salto and could distinctly hear seven notes of the musical scale as nature played her tune to the sacred valley. He described ‘the singing waters’ in a journal that he kept in four languages.

Could this be the source of the famous Taos Hum? Not all people hear it but those who do feel blessed and comforted by its nightly embrace.