Why it’s impossible to hum while holding your nose? Humming a tune is something we’ve all done at some point, whether it’s a favorite song or a mindless melody. But have you ever tried to hum while holding your nose? Chances are, you can’t – and it’s not just a matter of coordination or concentration. There’s a fascinating physiological reason why humming and nose-holding are mutually exclusive, and it has to do with the intricate relationship between our nasal passages, sinuses, and vocal cords. Let’s dive into the surprising science behind why humming with your nose pinched shut is an impossible feat.
Try Experimenting
Go ahead, we’ll wait. Grab ahold of your schnoz, your sniffer, your proboscis, and try to hum your favorite song. Or just any old song, for that matter. Maybe it’s a classic childhood choice like Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. Maybe it’s something of the new Taylor Swift album. Or, it’s Ozzy Osbourne’s classic opening verse line from “War Pigs” — if so, we salute you. But it doesn’t matter, because no matter what you try to do, you won’t be able to do it. Hum really hard, really soft, at a high pitch, a low pitch, open-mouthed, closed-mouthed — nope, no can do.
This fun little experiment — something between a party trick and the world’s most harmless dare — falls under the same “Did ya’ know?” category as other bodily factoids. For instance, as Christian Science Monitor outlines, did ya’ know that if you try to stand up out of a chair without bending forward, you can’t? There are some variations on this, like crossing one’s arms before standing, as Buzzfeed shows. It all deals with one’s “center of mass,” per the University of Guelph, often incorrectly called “center of gravity.”
And the humming while holding your nose thing? There’s a simple reason that you can’t. Go ahead and try humming again, but this time don’t pinch your nose closed — just place your fingers in front of your nostrils and feel the air. That’s right, you’re exhaling. Just like talking, singing, or even breathing, humming requires you to exhale.
The air must flow
There really isn’t much more to say about not being able to hum with your nose closed, since people reading this article are presumably alive and also therefore breathing. If you’ve spent any time breathing, you know how the whole thing goes: breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. Couldn’t get any simpler, right? That being said, folks might have never realized that producing sound — talking, singing, humming, etc. — requires exhalation.
The London Singing Institute goes into a bit of detail about how people produce sound, which all comes from the vocal cords in the throat. Producing sound requires passing air through the vocal cords, kind of like the way wind passes through a sail. The sail flaps around a bit, and so do the vocal cords. Voila: instant vibration. When someone exhales without creating any vocalizations, the air doesn’t pass through the vocal chords. All of this happens largely unconsciously, as no one sits around thinking to themselves, “I am now going to produce speech, therefore I am going to redirect the airflow coming out of my lungs through my vocal cords rather than bypass those vocal cords and push the air directly through my throat.”
As The World explains, vocal cords produce sound because they reverberate in a box: one’s own body. Otherwise, vocal cords would just sort of wobble around like a plucked rubber band. The box, though, needs an unclasped nasal passage for air to escape.
Why Humming with Your Nose Held is Impossible:
- Resonance is blocked: Humming relies on sound waves resonating through the nasal passages and sinuses, which is blocked when the nose is held shut.
- Nasal passages need to be open: For humming to work, the nasal passages need to be open to allow sound waves to escape and resonate.
- Muscular tension disrupts humming: Holding the nose engages facial and throat muscles, disrupting the precise coordination needed for humming.
- Vocal cord vibration is affected: The tension from holding the nose affects the vocal cords, making it difficult to produce the humming sound.
- It’s a physiological limitation: The combination of blocked resonance and muscular tension makes it physically impossible to hum while holding your nose.
