Whether young or old: Anyone spending a vacation at the beach can’t help but take home seashells and snail shells as souvenirs of sunny days by the water. They put us in a wistful vacation mood not only because of their beautiful appearance, but also because of the sound they make. After all, if you hold the curved shell up to your ear, you can hear a rustling sound that reminds you of the ocean. If you don’t really question how it works, you might actually think you can experience the ocean up close right at home on your couch. It’s a lovely idea, but unfortunately it doesn’t quite match reality—so what do we actually hear inside seashells and snail shells if it isn’t the sound of the sea?

Since the sound couldn't be coming from the sea, many people assumed it was their own blood. The blood, which is pumped through the veins and eventually flows to the head, is supposedly amplified by the skull, making a faint, pulsating sound audible to us. However, a simple experiment proves that this cannot be the case.

Now that we’ve been stripped of the lovely illusion of being able to experience a beach vacation right at home whenever we want, we’d like to finally figure out where that sound is really coming from. Scientists have found the answer through various experiments: The sound comes from our surroundings! We’re constantly exposed to sounds in our daily lives, so much so that we no longer even notice many of them. As soon as we hold a seashell—or any other hollow object—up to our ear, it acts as a kind of resonating chamber.

In practice, this means that the conch causes the sound waves from the environment to oscillate back and forth within the shell along with the air inside it. Some of these vibrations are attenuated, while others are amplified. The amplified vibrations combine to form sounds that ultimately reach our ears as noise. Accordingly, each conch has its own unique sound depending on its shape and size, since the size of the cavity is decisive for the result.

So the mystery of the sound of the ocean in seashells has been solved: it’s just the sounds of our surroundings—and, unfortunately, not the sound of the ocean itself—that have been captured. Nevertheless, we can imagine hearing the ocean if we focus on memories of summer, sunshine, and the beach while listening!

Did you have to turn the volume all the way up to hear the voice memo? Do you feel like you’re having more and more trouble understanding the people around you, or even having to ask them to speak louder? If your ability to understand speech is changing, you shouldn’t just ignore it and hope the problem will go away on its own. Untreated hearing loss can lead to further health complications. That’s why it’s all the more important not to be embarrassed and to have your hearing tested regularly—even as early as middle age! You can easily have a hearing test done by an ENT doctor or an audiologist. The sooner hearing loss is detected, the sooner risk factors can be mitigated and your quality of life restored.