HUMMING in this Penultimate Creative Practice Blog

Humming is the sound one makes while passing air through the larynx and yet keeping the lips closed completely.

The humming which comes from a relaxed exhalation of a breath, pitched in the lower part of a person’s vocal range, results in a sense of relaxation.  You can feel vibrations in your chest and neck. Your relaxed breathing also tends to become deeper and slower.

Some Tibetan monk communities use chosen words that close with a humming sound to indicate deep meaning. They say out the words and then hold the final phoneme, the hum, for long periods. In this particular video, the gathered participants hum in two-parts. One part is the very lowest, the second part hums at the interval of one major third above. A bell is rung which sounds at the interval of the fifth. The lowest hum and the bell represent the lowest and the highest octaves. Different participants are in different octave between.  

.

Here is the web address:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHDsCMvDUEQ.

For this creative blog, I enlisted the assistance of my husband. He is recovering from two surgeries. They gave him a small gizmo to encourage increased exhalation. Therefore, I was interested how humming might affect him.

We hummed in the following way: he hummed on the lowest pitch, I hummed on the third an octave higher, and then I rang a bell that sounded at the fifth above my husband’s pitch. We did this for 20 minutes.

He had to stop at different times during the humming. Initially he became dizzy. Then he coughed once. Otherwise, he did feel full body relaxation and a real focus in the mind.

Best of all, he said he wanted to do it again!

While continuing to research this topic, I also found a Georgian scholar, Dr. Joseph Jordania, who has spent time studying about and thinking about the hum. He came to this from his research of Georgian polyphonic folk song traditions. Though this song is not hummed, it is a traditional Georgian healing song sung for children. It is beautifully sung in three-part harmony.

  Here is the web address:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9P_KHDV4Js

In his article, “Music and Emotion: Humming in the Beginnings of Human History”, Dr. Jordania puts on his ethno-musicologist hat.

• He feels that humming can be thought of as the pre-linguistic “contact calls” among human group members. He suggests that, as with other animal groups, danger is marked by silence. Therefore, the continuous low noise in a group of the “contact calls” becomes an indication of well-being and safety. 
• He further suggests that while putting a child to sleep, a mother might substitute humming for the group noise. Humming relaxes the baby and she/he will fall asleep; humming relaxes everyone. 
• He lastly suggests that because it is associated with safety as a mechanism, humans are hard-wired to hum and therefore have a calmed reaction to humming. All of these suggestions could reinforce what we see when patients in a healthcare setting hum or are hummed to and feel more relaxed and/or happier.   You can find this article here: http://www.polyphony.ge/uploads/fortheng/02_jordania_engl.pdf.