As indicated in my OP: “There’s nothing above me but an attic, but the attic covers the whole area of that floor and I don’t hear it anywhere else. There are no fans or any devices whatsoever in the attic, and the sound is far too constant and unchanging to be coming from any biological source.”
That’s a very good idea. I had wanted to do that, but others objected. They’re not obstinate, so I should have no real problem working out a time to try that.
The fridge is on the other side of the house on the main floor. Even right next to it, the sound is not present. The bathrooms and all water supplies and plumbing in also on the other side of the house. I cannot hear the sound in the basement or anywhere else in the house, except, of course, my bedroom (which is on the other side of the house from all the items you mentioned). The only gas is used in the basement for the furnace and the water heater, which are also on the other side of the house from my bedroom.
Breaking all circuits is a fine idea that I’ll try as soon as I can work it out with the rest of the family.
Also a fine idea, but I tried that prior to posting my OP, but with no change to the sound.
Not as such. I suffer from extreme – and I mean extreme – insomnia and hypersomnia; I have been treated intensely for it for decades. Apnea is not the problem, though, and no treatment works for very long. One thing I was strongly advised to do was to cover over all windows to make them completely opaque (which was much harder to do than I’d expected). The point of all that being that I cannot open the windows.
What I have tried is going outdoors to where my bedroom windows are situated and listened carefully, both during the day and at night. I cannot hear the sound that I hear in the bedroom.
In my OP, I described how I had tried removing all batteries from all devices, including my smoke and CO detector. There was also a battery in my alarm clock in case of power outages, and I removed that one also. There are no other battery-powered devices in the room. I thought there might be a chance that a capacitor or three might still be charged, but I didn’t think they could stay charged for over an hour with no AC power to them. I might be wrong about that, however.
But one important thing to keep in mind is that, as I wrote in my OP, my ears as well as the Radio Shack dB meter could detect no variation in the sound or sound level by moving to any different part of the room. That is, the sound does not appear to have any particular source! It’s everywhere in the room at the same time.
To my way of thinking, that should be physically impossible except if it was coming from directly above the room covering every square inch. And as I said, if I go outside, I can’t hear it at all.
I try very hard to be intellectually honest, so I even seriously considered the idea that my mind had come to associate the bedroom with sleeping problems to such a severe degree that it created a kind of aural hallucination whenever I entered the room. That’s when I got out the Radio Shack dB meter to check my sanity. I found that the sound most definitely registers clearly on the meter. I suppose it’s barely possible that my seeing the meter register the sound was another hallucination, but one can take such self-doubt only so far!
I’m stumped. Breaking all the circuits is clearly the next thing to try…
Unfortunately, it only reports the sound pressure level. I have particularly good hearing which is partly due to genetics and partly to having very carefully protected my ears from over-loud sounds all my life. Thus, I suspect I can still hear sounds at about 20 KHz. My guess would be that the sound is about 16-18 KHz; very high indeed.
If you recall the high-frequency whine that old TVs used to make when they were either out-of-spec or made with low-quality components, that would be in about the same frequency range (subjectively, anyway. I don’t know the actual frequency those old TVs used to make). But there’s a certain high-speed oscillation that’s clearly audible, too. But the difference between the lowest and highest frequency is very small.
My only enemies are here at the SDMB Well, the Republicans don’t like me much either. Maybe Michelle Bachman put a curse on me? Wait, I know: it’s probably Louis Gohmert. You see, I’m gay, and in his… er, “mind”, I guess you’d say, homosexuality is akin to necrophilia.
And who wouldn’t want to electronically annoy a corpse-defiler?
Our toilets make such sounds while refilling, too, but only very rarely do they not turn off when complete. Also, they, too, are on the far side of the house from my bedroom, and I don’t have an attached bathroom.
No kids, but I do have nieces and nephews visit from time to time. They usually play computer games or the Wii, but one of my nephews has a gameboy. Thing is, he goes nuts when he forgets it here and I have to jump in the car and bring it to him right away, so it’s not here. And I searched my bedroom quite carefully, too.
What sort of sound is it? A continuous tone, rising and falling, a series of cheeps or what?
Have you tried clearing out all your cupboards and drawers? My WAG- some little forgotten device tucked away at the bottom of a drawer, that you missed when you turned everything off.
This sounds exactly like the problem I had with my daughter’s toy. It was high pitched but very low volume. So low I barely noticed it. It took me a while to decide if the noise was even real or if it was in my ears, but once I decided it was real, it drove me mad and gave me a headache. It also had an oscillation which made it sound like a tiny alarm of some sort. I knew I wouldn’t be able to use the living room until I found it.
I walked from one side of the room to the next trying to figure out which side of the room it was coming from. I walked and crawled all over my living room, putting my ear close to my daughter’s toys numerous times trying to find the source. It wasn’t until I put every single item in the living room up to my ear that I found it. Heck I was sitting right next to it while going through her toys and still didn’t know what side of the room it was coming from.
So, anyway, you’re not crazy. You’ve probably tried the rest of this, but I’ll say it anyway…
Have you looked under and behind all the furniture, behind the door, in the closet etc for any small electronic device? Have you tried taking all your electronic devices out of the room? Check every little item that may emit noise. Maybe something was in a drawer and fell out inside the dresser.
Her toy had a tiny speaker, which I think was the problem. Can you think of anything with batteries and a speaker or something that beeps that may be missing? A small voice recorder, camera, an old cell phone, a watch, a little keychain toy.
Turning all power off is something that’s been mentioned several times, and I’ll do that when I can work it out. There’s no water or pipes anywhere near my bedroom, and that’s the only place I can hear it.
I also understand that it is low frequency sounds which are often fairly non-directional, which is why it doesn’t matter much where you put a subwoofer. And I also understand that the reverse is true; that high-frequency sounds are far more directional. Which is one reason I am so baffled about not being able to find any spot at all where the sound was louder or softer.
So your idea that the sound is focused there from another, external source makes a lot of sense.
What is a roof turret vent? The roof is a typical peaked roof, but I don’t recall if there are any vents in the side. Let me go outside right now and look…
Yes, there are vents in the east and west side of the peaked roof. My bedroom is on the south side, and all the pipes and gas and bathrooms and fridge and so on are on the north side. There are no antennas; I get satellite TV and the dish is well away from the house on the back lawn (to the north). The power connection assembly is on the west side of the house, but my bedroom is in the southeast.
But that squeaking roof vent could be the source, as there’s one that’s also on the east side of the house, although it’s several feet to the north of my bedroom.
Would you please provide further info on how to determine if the roof vent is the source of the problem? Thanks!
It’s a continuous but slightly oscillating tone. As I wrote upthread, my guess is that it’s somewhere between 16 and 18 KHz, with no more than a dozen or two hertz difference between the higher and the slightly lower frequency in the slightly oscillating sound.
That’s worth checking into, thanks. Do you have any idea, though, why the sound cannot be localized? Wouldn’t the sound get louder as you approached the drawer the forgotten device was in?
Thanks for the tips! After killing the circuit breakers to my room and I still heard the sound, battery-operated devices seemed like the only remaining alternative. So I scoured the room for such devices and found only the three that I mentioned previously and removed their batteries. The sound remained unchanged.
But while I’ve never seen my nieces and nephews anywhere near my room. I never made the mistake of forbidding them to go in there lest it taunted and provoked them to do that simply *because *it was forbidden (as Adam Trask did deliberately to trick his sons into reading the Bible). I suppose it’s possible that one of them went in and forgot something there, but it’s hard to imagine them leaving it hidden in a drawer somewhere.
Nevertheless, I’ll scour my room again with that possibility in mind…
You say you were doubting your sanity, and you say you have other family members to consult before you can entirely shut down the electricity.
And then there’s what you haven’t said, so I have to ask: can anyone else hear it? Have you asked anyone else in the family to come in and listen?
Also, what is the reading that your meter shows? How loud is it? Have you tried the meter outside the room to see if it reads differently? It’s conceivably it’s picking up background noise that is not related to the sound you are hearing.
If that’s the case, and especially if others in the house don’t hear it – I would visit a doctor or an audiologist. There may be a physiological cause for a ringing in your ears. People who suffer from tinnitis hear tones, I believe. It’s not a hallucination as you classically think of it. I can’t explain why it would only happen in one room, but perhaps something in the room aggravates it.
A turret style of vent (actually called turbine vents)is a round spinning vent that sticks up a good 2 feet. The idea behind it is that a breeze will spin it drawing hot air out faster than convection. Doesn’t sound like you have one. You could be picking the sound up from a neighbor.
I wouldn’t discount water pipes without checking them first. If the sound is not inside a room then it’s outside focused in through a window or a wall or conduit.
My house will pick up low frequency sounds from 2 houses away and amazingly I can’t hear it if I go outside. My guess is that it travels through the sewer lines and is amplified in my basement.
Another example of hard to trace noises. I was helping my next door neighbor work on his house and we heard the damndest noise that defied explanation. It was a cyclical bussing sound and was quiet loud throughout the house. We were upstairs and in the basement looking for it. Turned out to be a cell phone in a kitchen cabinet. Took forever to find it because the cabinets were bolted to the ceiling by way of a boxed in extension, which acted like a sound chamber for the whole house. the sound traveled to the ceiling and then a common wall.
Since it’s a higher frequency I would put a tube to your ear to help isolate it and rotate through the 6 planes of a cube to see where it seems loudest. A toilet roll would work nicely. You can even place the tube directly on walls and windows like a stethoscope.
With that I would make a check list to eliminate what it isn’t:
I have had mysterious sounds before, things that I could hear but that my husband couldn’t. Fortunately I have kids, and they could hear it. They turned out to be:
a smoke detector in my attic that beeped every 30 seconds, which I could hear better in the bedroom, but also in the hall–which eventually led me to the attic. It took awhile, because I would hear it, move closer to where I thought I heard it, then wait 22 seconds…then move again, wait…etc. Very annoying. Once I opened the door to the attic my husband could hear it, though. We didn’t even know this smoke detector was there.
A discarded 2-liter pop bottle with the lid on, but not really tight. This one lasted a couple of hours and was constant, and kind of buzzy. Apparently there was some fizz left in the bottle.
-my neighbor’s attic vent, which somebody mentioned above–a thing that spins around, sometimes, to let hot air out of the house.
-an electronic toy (Buzz Lightyear, actually), behind the bottom drawer of my son’s bunk bed, but easy to find because the sound was only in his room.
-Also, occasionally the dog next door howls at sirens, and simultaneously one of the strings on my piano sounds. I don’t know whether the string is responding to the siren, or to the dog. I think tuning the piano will fix this one.
The smoke detector in the attic was the hardest one, because it really was louder in the bedroom, kind of faint in the hall where the attic access was located. My guess is that it’s something in your attic.
Did anything happen two days ago? Heat come on for the first time? Disconnected swamp cooler?
Well, the Republicans don’t like me much either. Maybe Michelle Bachman put a curse on me? Wait, I know: it’s probably