Humming
voiced bilabial nasal sound
A hum (/hʌm/ ) is a sound made by producing a wordless tone with the mouth closed, forcing the sound to emerge from the nose. To hum is to produce such a sound, often with a melody. It is also associated with thoughtful absorption, 'hmm'.
A hum has a particular timbre (or sound quality), usually a monotone or with slightly varying tones. There are other similar sounds not produced by human singing that are also called hums, as the sound produced by machinery in operation, such as a microwave, or by an insect in flight. The hummingbird was named for the sound that bird makes in flight which sounds like a hum.
Mechanics
A 'hum' or 'humming' by humans is created by the resonance of air in various parts of passages in the head and throat, in the act of breathing. The 'hum' that a hummingbird creates is also created by resonance: in this case by air resistance against wings in the actions of flying, especially of hovering.
Humming in human evolution
Joseph Jordania suggested that humming could have played an important role in the early human (hominid) evolution as contact calls. Many social animals produce seemingly haphazard and indistinct sounds (like chicken cluck) when they are going about their everyday business (foraging, feeding).
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Humming” is voiced bilabial nasal sound. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Humming, voiced and bilabial, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2922301. The Library of Congress control number is sh2019000173. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Humming” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.