The "Mother Earth Frequency": The Sound Driving Some People Crazy

As much as we may all crave the idea of enjoying a rare slice of blissful peace and quiet, I do wonder how many times any of us have ever experienced the sensation of complete silence. There’s always someone or something making a bloody racket somewhere. Even if you stepped into one of those freaky Anechoic Chambers – custom-designed product-testing rooms designed by the likes of Google to completely absorb any reflections of sound – you’ll only end up getting driven to insanity by the beating of your own heart and the gurgling of your own belly.

I suppose that quite a lot depends on what we would define as a peaceful sound and a disruptive sound. If you’re enjoying a couple of hours of sunbathing or gravedigging in your back garden, you might well consider the relentless sounds of birdsong and chirruping crickets to be perfectly natural elements of the peaceful ambience. But as soon as that idiot from next door fires up his ridiculous petrol lawnmower, you’re gonna feel annoyed that your already quite noisy silence has now seemingly been shattered.

Your chances of ever escaping from the more unwelcome noises of the universe are further diminished if you’re one of the unfortunate minority to be permanently tuned into the low-pitched throbbing hum of Mother Earth chugging away in the background.

The Global Hum has been described as the sound of a diesel engine idling, a fluorescent lightbulb about to explode, a dentist’s drill, and a distant disco blasting out 90’s acid house tunes on an eternal loop. Depending on where you live, the mysterious noise can only be heard by between 2% to 11% of the local community. It can be heard outdoors, although a big chunk of sufferers – often collectively known as ‘The Hummers’ or ‘The Hearers’ – can detect the noise more strongly inside their own home.

Some claim that the Hum is a constant 24-hour soundtrack whilst others hear it particularly strongly at specific times of the day. It’s a sound which may or not be impossible to capture on tape.

And the long list of locations in which residents have complained about the noise that can’t ever be silenced include quaint English villages, Scottish seaside resorts, Australian beach towns, and the desert landscapes of New Mexico.

At the very least, the people tuned into The Global Hum can find it a bit annoying. In more extreme cases, it can lead to the shaking of kitchen counters, random nosebleeds, serious illness, and allegedly even death. And yet surprisingly few people appear to have shown any interest in finding out what’s causing it, leading to suspicions of an international cover-up.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that an industrial planet crammed full of factories and vehicles can get a bit noisy at times, but some suggest it’s not quite as simple as that. Other contenders for the source of the Hum include the sound of government-sanctioned 5G mind-control programs, sonic fish, the constant buzzing of the refrigerator in your kitchen, or a grave warning of an impending catastrophe from Mother Earth. Or could it be that the sound only exists inside the heads of The Hearers?

By the way, please remember that closed captions are available on the YouTube version of this episode, for those who can’t hear Simon’s voice above the cacophonous incidental music of the world.

I would certainly never describe myself as a Hearer, although I am reminded of the strange background noise I often used to hear when I was a kid growing up in the old haunted mining town of Rotherham. And no, this isn’t a build-up to a gag about the constant yelps of terror on the streets of the North; it’s absolutely true. I can most vividly remember hearing it when walking to school on the first day back after the summer holidays. It sounded like the mildly disconcerting rumbling of machinery in far-away factories on the horizon, but I couldn’t think what factories could be making such a noise.

I didn’t think too much of it and never had a conversation with anyone about it at the time because I assumed we could all hear it. It was only years later when I brought it up in conversation that my old local friends looked at me as if I was spouting nonsense. Actually, that’s not such an unusual look shot in my direction, especially around a pub table.

I later concluded that I maybe only picked up on the industrial noise because I was walking to school in the quiet stillness of the early morning for the first time in six weeks, when I’d become so accustomed to just watching Pink Panther cartoons in my pyjamas whilst munching on Coco Pops. It often felt as if the noise was the world’s sonic interpretation of my miserable slump back into monotonous mundanity, and a clear audio signal that we were officially on the dark path to Winter. There were no press reports of a Rotherham Hum, though.

The earliest recorded account of the mysterious background noise of Earth dates back to 1828 when a group of travellers began to climb Mount Maladeta in the Pyrenees, and found that the eerie silence – not many petrol lawnmowers around those parts, presumably – was broken by a dull, low, moaning aeolian sound which was never identified.

The first time that The Global Hum made the national headlines wasn’t until the 1970s when The News of the World paper ran a story under the headline “Have You Heard The Hum?” The story related to an outbreak of the Hum in Bristol in England, where a low-pitched noise had been giving the locals headaches, nosebleeds, and sleep loss. The newspaper later claimed that over 800 readers from around the UK had responded to the article, many of them speculating that the most likely cause was UFO activity. They’re a bit like that in Bristol.

A second outbreak was reported in the coastal town of Largs in Scotland in the 1980s. This one triggered headaches and chest pains, and was noted as being particularly noisy from indoors late at night, with some of the affected residents suspecting that the local naval base may be to blame.

A couple of years later, the Hum was first reported to have crossed the Atlantic when the residents of Sausalito, California complained of being awoken at night by a noise as loud as an airplane engine.

A much bigger and more heavily publicised outbreak rocked up in Taos in New Mexico in the 1990s, during which a whirring, buzzing sound was annoying over 8,000 residents, prompting an official Congressional investigation. No conclusion was ever reached, and the noise continues to be heard today.

A reported constant low rumble in the industrial town of Kokomo in Indiana was apparently so powerful that it could make dead leaves dance on the ground.

Meanwhile, over on the other side of the globe, another Hum in Auckland, New Zealand was so disruptive that it reportedly drove one Hearer into revving up a chainsaw next to his ear in manic desperation.

And one of the more famous Hums of all time is the one first heard in Windsor, Canada in 2011, which some people claim sounds like the Enterprise from Star Trek gearing up for warp speed, whilst others suggest that it’s more like the sound of the heartbeat you hear when pressing your ear against a pregnant belly. And I kind of like this Womb World theory. We could be living inside the pocket of a pregnant planet, waiting for Mother Earth to give birth to us all and set us loose into base reality. Well, so far, I’m thinking it’s either that or a largely ignored SOS distress call from an ancient alien civilization.

Non-Hearers or Hum-Deaf people might shrug all this off as nutty nonsense which isn’t worth worrying about too much. But some of the alleged side-effects can be pretty serious. And it’s not just the nosebleeds and the diarrhoea and the nervous agitation and the need for some affected citizens to leave the house at night and sleep on park benches in a bid to break out from the blaring background babble. The Bristol Hum was reported by the BBC to have been directly responsible for a suicide.

And then there was the case of the 2013 Washington Navy Yard Shooting during which the perpetrator Aaron Alexis fatally shot twelve victims before he was himself shot dead by the police. A message later retrieved on the killer’s computer revealed: “Ultra low frequency attack is what I’ve been subject to for the last three months. And to be perfectly honest, that is what has driven me to this.” Having said that, I think Alexis might also have had several other troubles kicking off inside his head which ran deeper than a simple low-frequency hum.

It might have proved helpful if somebody out there could at least have found a medical solution to blocking out the Hum. Slipping on a big pair of earmuffs to drown out the noise might sound like a good idea, but many Hearers conclude that this strangely just intensifies the pulsating throb.

The most effective recommended remedy provided by the Hearer community is to mask the sound by switching on loud hissing electric fans. But that sounds a bit bonkers to me. I had a mate called Colin who reckoned that he was minding his own business in town one day when he was suddenly accosted by a group of thugs who threatened to punch him in the face for no reason.

Colin’s response was to freak out the thugs by punching himself repeatedly in the face whilst yelling aggressively that he could probably do a better job of it on his own. When sharing this heartwarming anecdote with me, Colin seemed quite proud that his tactic had apparently worked. The thugs just shrugged their shoulders and wandered off to bother a slightly less potty victim.

But I felt compelled to point out to Colin that he hadn’t really solved what I would have considered the fundamental point of not getting punched in the face. And it’s a similar thing with the electric fan tactic. You’re blocking out an irritating noise by replacing it with an even more irritating noise, which is spectacularly missing the point.

Still, the Hearer community doesn’t have much else to go on. They may have formed positively buzzing online groups in which they can share ideas, solutions, news, and yes, conspiracy theories, but they’ve largely been left to their own devices as not many others seem willing to investigate the problem. Authorities rarely seem keen to invest time or money into tackling the Hum, and not many people bother to take the matter seriously. The Hearers are often seen as delusional attention seekers, and are grouped together with UFO spotters and conspiracy theorists and people who claim to enjoy cans of Heineken.

US geoscientist David Deming put together a rare comprehensive academic report in 2004. David is himself a Hearer. He’s also a climate change-denier who believes that carbon taxes are “stupidity taxes.” Oh, and he feels that homosexuality should be tolerated rather than celebrated, and that historic homophobia was based on sound reasoning rather than irritational prejudice.

American science teacher and lecturer Dr Glen MacPherson – another Hearer who sounds much more like a guy you might enjoy having a drink with – took up the baton in 2012 with his own investigations. But both of these studies ended on very weird notes for different reasons that we’ll come back to later.

Dr Glen MacPherson also took the time to set up The World Hum Map and Database, inviting the troubled public to write to him with their own humming experiences so that he could plot them on the map and record data relating to each individual. Over 7,000 Hearers responded, mostly from the US and western Europe. And we learned at least a couple of interesting new noisy nuggets of information from the database.

For example, it was originally reported in the UK that 75% of Hearers were women who were middle-aged or older, and this was widely accepted for decades. But Dr Glen has discovered that the average age of a Hearer is 40, and that it’s much more of an even split between men and women. So this can’t be something else that we just chalk down to women’s troubles.

It had also been accepted for years that only around 2% of a local community were able to detect the Global Hum, whereas Dr Glen was the first to notice that this figure rose sharply to 11% in other specific areas. Dr Glen now believes that approximately 4% of the entire population are tuned into The Global Hum.

But what’s the most logical explanation we’ve come up with for the secret Mother Earth frequency?

The experts might not have reached a definitive conclusion yet, but I reckon I’ve pretty much cracked it without the need to spend years researching it or drawing lots of pretty maps. But let’s first take a look at some of the more popular theories that have gained traction over the years, one of which might be bang on the money.

I think we can begin by dismissing some of the more outlandish theories which speculate that the source of the Global Hum is the breaking of the seventh seal, echoes of the big bang, a government-sanctioned form of remote torture, and ghosts tunnelling under the Earth.

Although we might mock the idea of Mother Earth making the sound herself, it’s not out of the question that we could be hearing the perfectly natural noises of a planet just trying to go about its business. Scientists have long speculated that the Earth creates ultra-low frequencies as it constantly vibrates and stretches and compresses and yawns, but it’s proving to be a very difficult thing to measure and the sound would almost certainly be undetectable by any human ear.

A team of French researchers reported in 2015 that the Hum is far more likely to be generated from the floor of the ocean. They discovered that colliding waves moving in opposite directions can create very weak microseismic waves that cause the ocean floor to vibrate, producing a low-frequency oscillation which could be picked up by humans with very sensitive hearing. Or it could be the vibrations from erupting volcanoes. They tend to drag on a bit and can circle the Earth several times over.

When Krakatoa erupted in 1883, the Earth was left quivering like jelly for several days.

However, Elizabeth Shiller, a Canadian physicist who investigated The Windsor Hum, suggests that none of these natural theories – which also include underground volcanic activity and the movement of tectonic plates – are consistent with the reported manifestations of the hum. And none of them fully explain why certain outbreaks of the Hum lasted for a specific time frame in a specific location before largely disappearing. It’s not as if volcanoes suddenly stopped erupting or the ocean floor suddenly stopped vibrating.

Perhaps we don’t have to dig quite so deep down to consider a far more obvious suggestion. Industrial Earth is a pretty clangorous place which is constantly bombarded with man-made noise pollution from factories, vehicles, and construction workers building the latest branches of Taco Bell. We’re bound to hear a bit of sound in the background from time to time, aren’t we?

It’s also interesting to note that the majority of reported outbreaks occur in urban areas. It could be the case that the industrial noise is always there, but it’s usually drowned out in the bustle of the cities by the constant sound of chatter and life and people complaining about potholes. We only begin to detect it when we get back to the relative calm of leafy suburbia.

The only problem with this theory is that a big chunk of Hearers claim to only hear the noise indoors which wouldn’t really make much sense if the noise was coming from outside. So this leads us into the next obvious suggestion: The noise is just the indoor sounds of humming refrigerators and electrical appliances in the home.

Nope, this one has apparently been disproved too. Several Hearers have gone as far as to turn off all the power in their homes in a bid to escape the din, but find that the hum only becomes stronger in the absence of noisy powered-up appliances.

So now we must be getting close to the truth. It’s all just inside people’s heads, isn’t it? All these Hearers must really just be suffering from Tinnitus – an internal perception of sound generated by your auditory and nervous systems which often expresses itself as a ringing or clicking or buzzing noise in your ears. In fact, Dr Jonathan Hazell from the Royal National Institute for Deaf People in the UK was quite adamant about this in 1994.

He dismissed the Global Hum as rubbish, and sniffily declared: “Hummers are just a group of people who cannot accept they have tinnitus.”

However, 2004 climate change-denying-investigator David Deming utterly rejected this theory in his study. He pointed out that the hum sounds reported by Hearers are significantly different to the symptoms of tinnitus. The Hum is also usually only heard at very specific times of the day – particularly late at night and early morning – and in very specific locations. In contrast, tinnitus is pretty much omnipresent and can be heard anywhere.

Besides, the idea of whole towns getting caught up in a spread of contagious tinnitus doesn’t really ring true.

So I guess that leaves us with mass hysteria. When in doubt and no other options are left on the table, we can usually chalk it down to the psychological phenomenon of mass hysteria in which large groups of people get caught up in collective delusions that spiral out of control. But David Deming isn’t having that, either.

In his 2004 study, he noted that The Global Hum is curiously publicity shy. Whereas a mass hysteria event thrives and escalates on word-of-mouth, any excitement over the Hum appears, if anything, to die down a little after a new outbreak is reported in the press and then quickly forgotten about. He also points out that most Hearers tend to carry out their own independent research which leads them to the wider Hearer community, rather than just joining in the mad throng of mass hysteria.

So what conclusion did David Deming reach in his original 2004 study? Well, he seemed convinced that Very Low Frequency (VLF) radio signals produced by the military were to blame. During the 1960s, the US Navy rolled out the Take Charge and Move Out system which enabled a network of aircraft to communicate with submerged nuclear submarines and other vessels via VLF radio waves with frequencies from 3 to 30Hz.

Deming observed that the frequencies could be low and powerful enough to attack the human senses and induce a crippling headache, and this could also explain why a source location can never be accurately pinned down, as the source is actually a fleet of moving aircraft. It’s also worth noting that this upgrading of military technology more or less coincided with the first reports of the Global Hum in the States.

Deming rounded off his study by proposing that his theory could easily be tested by building a big sealed box which blocked all low-frequency waves, and then stepping inside the box to ascertain if the noise disappeared.

Okay. So this is the bit where Deming builds the big box to test his theory, right? Nope. After reaching this dramatic conclusion, Deming suddenly lost all interest in The Global Hum and buggered off back to denying climate change, and suggesting that gay people are destined to catch syphilis.

It was Dr Glen MacPherson who came across Deming’s findings in 2012 and decided to carry on with the work that Deming had lazily sacked off. Dr Glen raised the money for materials via crowdsourcing, and teased the building of the box to the online community of Hearers. And yet when the VLF-blocking box was finally complete, Dr Glen strangely developed cold feet about stepping inside. When Colin Dickey from The New Republic conducted an interview with Dr Glen in 2016, Colin was under the impression that he would witness the testing of the box. But whilst Dr Glen was happy enough to show off the black low-carbon steel box in his woodshed, he refused to even open it. He came up with increasingly vague excuses about how he didn’t believe the conditions were right, and how he didn’t want to get too distracted from his main job, as the school year was just about to start up again. Surely it would only have taken a couple of bloody minutes. And the online community began to get increasingly frustrated with Dr Glen’s reticence, with one forum member angrily urging: “Go in, already! What is it with this cliffhanger shit??”

Dr Glen eventually plucked up the courage to step inside the box before the year was out. The result? He could hear The Global Hum as loud as ever. Bugger.

Perhaps the whole hypothesis was doomed to fail anyway as researchers from the University of Illinois had already stated that it’s incredibly unlikely that non-pulsed continuously varying radio frequency signals could have any impact on living tissue or human auditory systems.

It may sound as if we’re getting nowhere fast in finding a definitive answer. But it’s claimed that different answers have already been found for specific outbreaks of the Hum.

The Kokomo hum in Indiana is believed to have been traced to a cooling tower in a local DaimlerChrysler plant and an air compressor at a Haynes International Plant. When both were powered down, the Hum seemed to stop for the majority, but some still heard it.

The Windsor Hum in Canada was connected to the blast furnaces in operation at U.S. Steel’s Great Lakes Works on Zug Island, across the Detroit River in Michigan. The steel plant refused to cooperate with silly investigations but when the financially troubled company closed down indefinitely in 2020, the noise disappeared with it. But not for all.

Slightly more fishy explanations were uncovered for Hums in California, West Seattle, and Hythe in the UK. The Sausalito Hum in California was believed to be the mating cry of the Humming Toadfish. The male fish can vibrate their gas bladders up to 150 times a second in a bid to catch some sexy funtime action, and the sound is powerful enough to resonate through the hulls of houseboats.

On a very similar note, the West Seattle Hum and the Hythe Hum were deemed to be down to the mating call of the Midshipman Fish and other sonic fish. But not everyone is totally convinced about that. In the case of West Seattle, a researcher from the University of Washington reckoned that the sound is not powerful enough to reach inland, whilst the Hythe Council pointed out that they don’t even get many sonic fish in the UK.

And as for the unreported Rotherham Hum… I reached out on social media to a group of old friends to ask if they could remember it. Most of them told me to stop talking shite, but a few of them suggested that it could have been the sound of traffic blowing in on the wind from the nearest motorway. A couple of others told me that there used to be some sort of steelworks factory very nearby, of which I have no memory. One of them reported that she could still hear the Hum, but her husband couldn’t hear a thing.

So we’re still left with a giant pulsating web of contradictions. It’s the sound of an industrial world which can also be heard more strongly indoors. It’s an acoustic sound which is only intensified when you wear earmuffs. It’s a constant sound which can only be heard at certain times of the day.

It’s an internal body sound which can be heard simultaneously by several people with no medical condition. It’s a hum and a whirr and a deep, throbbing rumble. And it’s a sound which is impossible to record, yet some people have recorded it.

Quick note about that last point. Dr Glen MacPherson reckons that nobody has ever successfully captured the hum, yet somebody did upload an alleged 12-hour recording of The Taos Hum to YouTube in 2014. I really wouldn’t recommend tracking it down as it’s largely just 12 hours of fuzzy droning nothingness, and we surely can’t be boring you that much. However, when Financial Times reporter Imogen West-Knight investigated the Halifax Hum in West Yorkshire in 2022, she surprised herself by picking up on the noise, and attempted to capture the sound on her mobile phone. When she returned to her hotel room later that night, the Hum had mysteriously disappeared from the recording.

But it’s precisely all these contradictions which have led me to my own firm conclusion which I’m sure many of you have reached way ahead of me. We will never find a definitive answer to The Global Hum. And that’s because there is absolutely no such thing as The Global Hum. Or at least, there’s no single Hum which is collectively heard by people scattered all over the world.

We clearly don’t all hear things in exactly the same way. Most humans can pick up frequencies between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz. Any frequency below this range is classed as infrasound, whilst any frequency above the range is classed as ultrasound. But some people are still naturally going to have more sensitive hearing than others, leading to that classic exchange often wheeled out in horror movies: “Can you hear that?”

“No. I can’t hear a thing.” It’s not just a movie trope. Some ears will naturally pick up on things that other ears don’t.

Also, the second guy in that conversation is about to get devoured by a werewolf.

Perhaps of equal importance is how we react to sound. Whilst most of us might be able to blank out any unwelcome or irrelevant background noise, others can become totally fixated on an irritating sound, and this only serves to increase the hearer’s anxiety and amplify the volume of the noise. One example that instantly springs to my mind is the ticking alarm clock that I keep in the guest bedroom of my cottage in Cornwall.

When some of my visitors or captured tourists wake up the next morning, they complain to me that they had to rip the batteries out of the alarm clock as the constant ticking was driving them round the bend. Yet when I ask other guests about it, they say that they never even noticed there was a ticking alarm clock in the room at all.

I think it’s perfectly plausible that many Hearers are just people with sensitive hearing who are zoning in on the everyday background noises of the world such as factories, traffic, power lines, blast furnaces, construction work, and repetitive burger flipping. I’m pretty sure that my own Rotherham Hum – which I only ever heard in the early morning outdoors – was simply an industrial noise intensified by the direction of the wind.

In more unusual cases, we could potentially be hearing underground activity, high-pressure gas-pipes, the mating cry of the horny sonic fish, or as in one particular case, seismic signals. A hum outbreak in 2018 was comprehensively traced to the island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean. The island had experienced an extraordinarily large number of tectonic earthquakes that were creating seismic signals which sounded like the tone of a large bell and lasted for up to half an hour each time.

If the Hum follows you indoors, you could potentially be hearing something inside your own home. I strongly suspect that many sufferers who haven’t yet experimented with powering down, really are just tuning into the sounds of their own electrical appliances and the buzzing of their own fridges.

And of course, some breeds of Hum may have no external source at all. That 12-hour recording of The Taos Hum is most likely a recording of a very real sound, but it would be far more difficult to capture other sounds that only exist inside the human body. Some Hearers are probably suffering from genuine cases of tinnitus. But that’s perhaps not the only explanation for an internal noise.

In 2009, science writer Benjamin Radford explained how our ears are capable of generating their own quirky little noises – known as Spontaneous Otoacoustic Emissions. The vast majority of us won’t ever hear them, but some people will pick up on the buzzing and ringing and hissing tones of this DIY Ear Disco if they’re enjoying a particularly quiet moment.

As for Dr Glen MacPherson, he now seems to be leaning towards the idea that some Hums are triggered by an entirely neurological element in the human brain which we simply can’t even begin to identify yet. Sounds quite reasonable to me. Presumably, he threw his useless big black box into the skip or converted it into an outdoor dog bath.

Ultimately, the reason that different Hearers report different types of sounds at different times of day in different locations is because they’re potentially reporting the sounds of thousands of different things under thousands of different conditions. The Hearers aren’t all humming to the same tune.

Still, this has given me a good idea for my next script. Over the years, I’ve heard countless stories from people from all over the world who walk into completely unconnected locations and complain that “It smells a bit funny in here.” This can’t just be coincidence. But is your nose tuned into The Great Global Whiff? Leave the map and the database to me, I’ve got this.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Global Hum?

The Global Hum is a low-pitched throbbing hum that some people report hearing, often described as the sound of a diesel engine idling, a fluorescent lightbulb about to explode, a dentist’s drill, or a distant disco.

Where has the Global Hum been reported?

The Global Hum has been reported in various locations around the world, including quaint English villages, Scottish seaside resorts, Australian beach towns, and the desert landscapes of New Mexico.

What are some of the health effects associated with the Global Hum?

Some people report that the Global Hum can cause shaking of kitchen counters, random nosebleeds, serious illness, and in extreme cases, even death.

What are some theories about the cause of the Global Hum?

Theories about the cause of the Global Hum include industrial noise, government-sanctioned 5G mind-control programs, sonic fish, vibrations from erupting volcanoes, and even the sound of the Earth itself.

How common is the Global Hum?

The Global Hum is reported by between 2% to 11% of the local community, depending on the location. It is estimated that approximately 4% of the entire population may be tuned into the Global Hum.

Can the Global Hum be recorded?

The Global Hum is often described as impossible to capture on tape, although there have been claims of recordings, such as a 12-hour recording of The Taos Hum uploaded to YouTube.

What are some remedies suggested by the Hearer community?

The most effective remedy suggested by the Hearer community is to mask the sound by switching on loud hissing electric fans, although this is not universally accepted as a good solution.

What is the VLF radio signals theory proposed by David Deming?

David Deming proposed that Very Low Frequency (VLF) radio signals produced by the military could be the cause of the Global Hum. He suggested that these signals could induce a crippling headache and explain why the source location can never be accurately pinned down.

What is the author’s conclusion about the Global Hum?

The author concludes that there is no single Global Hum that is collectively heard by people scattered all over the world. Instead, different people may be hearing different sounds under different conditions.

What is the significance of the Mayotte Hum?

The Mayotte Hum was traced to an extraordinarily large number of tectonic earthquakes that were creating seismic signals which sounded like the tone of a large bell and lasted for up to half an hour each time.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The “Mother Earth Frequency”: The Sound Driving Some People Crazy
• Hero image source by Sadie-Michaela Harris / openverse, cc0.