(n.) A low continuous sound, esp. as produced by water, wind, etc.

I hear things murmur the most when I am alone. The murmurs sound almost like whistles or whispers, like waterlilies and wallflowers unclenching the tight fists of their petals. Things seem to murmur the most when I am outside. There is a silence as I step into the woods, and then my ears begin to adjust. The quiet abounds. It is as soft as flesh. I can hear myself cutting into it, splitting it. It surrounds me. The leaves in subtle motion, the crinkle of the branches, the telephone wires that twist through the canopy above, the beetles crawling up the branches. Everything is magnified. I can hear my feet striking the ground. On top of the mountain, I look down at the clearing, which has been cut by a timber company, the stumps of deadened trees filling the landscape of bent green grasses. Above, the pale blue sky. Below, the houses spread like a trail of ants. The telephone wires criss-cross through my vision. The emptiness murmurs to me, its voice raspy and smooth. 

(n.) An instance of murmuring; an expression of discontent in subdued voices, esp. on the part of a crowd. Chiefly in plural.

The word itself is a reduplication of two phonemes – mur, mur. A nasal into a glide, a self-contained trochee. From the Middle English murmuren, from Latin murmurare, “to mutter, make a gentle sound, roar, grumble,” developed from Greek’s mormýrein, “(of water) to boil noisily,” Sanskrit’s marmara, “rustling, rushing,” and Lithuanian’s murmėti “to babble, mutter.” 

The word implies motion. Watch the way it slips through the teeth like a brook – easy to miss. Rivers babble, murmur, mutter. We assign speech to water. That sweet burbling sound of something rushing along, catching sunlight, headed for a destination, is like a sentence that we can’t quite make out. It’s intimate. We listen to murmurs like a child crouching down on a rock, trying to make out what the stream wants them to know. What mysteries lie in the current? There’s an unknowability implied there. I cup my hands around my ear and wade into the stream, the cool stones touching my feet, the water surrounding me. 

Most words aren’t onomatopoeias — amorphous containers for a nebula of experience. Moon is a bilabial nasal in English, tsuki, an affricate in Japanese, yue, a palatal approximant in Chinese. But some words are inscribed from their wavelengths in the air. Words for crow, across languages, have a hard [k] sound, like the song erupting from their little black beaks. Murmur, too — across languages, the little letters line up, hip-to-hip, across the page, like droplets of water adhering to one another.

1593: W. Shakespeare, Venus & Adonis. Ech shadow makes him stop, ech murmour stay.

Inanimate objects murmur to me. I hear it in the light of my lamp – thousands of light particles spilling out and scattering soundlessly on the edge of my table, babbling to me as they whisk past my ear. The charcoals scattered across my common room’s rug murmur to me. I watch the milieu of my friends move, drawing fine lines with their pencils and rulers for their architecture class. They do not murmur, but their hands do – quick and elegant fingers moving like spiders. There are no shadows, not here. Everything alight with a last word, a first breath.

1892: H. Sweet New Eng. Gram. I. 234   There is another class of murmur diphthongs ending in (ə), as in hear, here (hiə), fare, faire (feə).

murmur vowel  n. Phonetics a glide or weak vowel; = schwa n.

1957: S. Potter Mod. Ling. i. 27   The inhabitants of Birmingham..call their city [bə:miŋgəm], but Londoners call it [bə:miŋəm]... Midlanders raise the velum against the wall of the pharynx and make a plosion with the back of the tongue upon it before passing from agma to the murmur-vowel, whereas the people of London keep the nasal pharynx open at this juncture.

Murmur diphthongs end with the consonant [ɹ], which changes the vowel to a sound that is neither long nor short. Murmur. But we barely notice, do we? It’s one of those words like footprints in the snow – always receding. The schwa is the unstressed central vowel. In English orthography, almost every single vowel can be reduced to a schwa. “Schwa,” itself, literally means “emptiness,” taken from the German language. The idea of the murmur is the schwa, the emptiness at the center of so many words. 

The murmur at the valley of every word is what allows the peak of the rest of the consonants and the vowels, for the sonorants to rise and the obstruents to clip. Murmurs are critical to create the acoustic contrasts that allow for categorical boundaries in language perception. In a 2006 study on perceptual illusions, researchers discovered that native English speakers consistently identified nonsense words with sonority plateaus or falls at the onset of the group of letters as disyllabic instead of monosyllabic, suggesting that people use changes in sonority to separate one word from the next. Sonority is an abstract phonological feature that is correlated with loudness. I think of it as moving from speech into song, prose into poetry, in the scale of a single letter, a single phoneme, a single syllable. It’s the yawning of the mouth, the motion of air. The sonority hierarchy places vowels at the top ([a], [i], etc.), followed by glides, liquids, nasals, and obstruents ([t], [d], [f], etc.) at the bottom. 

“He takes her hand and they step

into bomb crater. Look how they shuffle

and sway in its moon-bruised shade…

Ask me of the song and I will tell

of the rain's slow murmur.” – Ocean Vuong, “Despite Everything, My Dancers”

Here is a writer who speaks at a murmur – everything wrapped in the film of beauty. I am sometimes frustrated by that quality of poetry, how when you lean close to listen to individual words, all you can hear is silence. But when I lie back on my bed and hear the murmur of poetry from far away, the cadences come out to me. It becomes something tangible I can wear on my neck like a ribbon. Any louder, and the sound would begin breaking glasses. A poem is a murmur that strikes us and blinds us simultaneously: we cannot exactly understand why we feel the way we do after reading one; the individual words we can no longer remember; the individual ‘points’ and ‘characters’ fade away. All we know is that cadence, the subtle rise and fall of sound.

1667: J. Milton Paradise Lost vii. 68   One whose drouth / Yet scarce allay'd still eyes the current streame, Whose liquid murmur heard new thirst excites.

A lover’s murmur is something forlorn. 

1853: M. Arnold Scholar Gipsy in Poems (new ed.) 202   All the live murmur of a summer's day.

And a summer’s murmur is something unending. The word itself rolls. It has a continuation within itself. It is a word that is easy to start, and seems to end with echoes. A murmur is both in the background and in the foreground. It is always sweet and always warm. The color of skin under June, the color of a wooden canoe peeling through a jade-green lake, the color of lightning. 

(n.) A word or sentence spoken softly or indistinctly; faint or barely audible speech, esp. among a crowd or assembly; the subdued expression of a particular feeling by a group of people. 

1974: F. Forsyth Dogs of War iii. xx. 348   The mechanical noise emanating from the engine casings could..be reduced to a low murmur by the muffling boxes.

Sometimes I think about if you magnified all the sounds of one type across the country – for example, turned up the volume on every single air conditioning unit in the United States, what kind of drone would erupt across the city, like locusts descending. We take for granted the dulling of sound that technology has provided us. But I remember it at midnight when I hear cars roaring past, beasts of the future. 

(n.) Any of various auscultatory sounds; (originally) the quiet rustling sound of normal respiration (more fully respiratory murmur); (later) spec. any of various adventitious sounds of cardiac or vascular origin, sometimes of no significance but sometimes caused by valvular lesions of the heart or other diseases of the circulatory system (frequently in heart murmur).

1851: W. H. Walshe Dis. Lungs & Heart 212   Sounds of adventitious origin and properties produced either within or on the surface of the heart, are termed Murmurs.

I hold myself perfectly still in the mirror. The world around me is rustling with faint movement, but I am not: wide-eyed, at night, I am a plastic statue. I touch my arms and stretch my legs. I can hear my breath. I listen to the sounds of animals, their caws and their crickets. I forget about our own bodies. They feel like awkward, wayward stations rather than organisms. When I run I feel the ground jolt up my legs and into my body. Sometimes I remember. When I put my head in my friend’s lap and she strokes my hair, I can hear that, the quiet whisk of her calloused fingers against my head; I can feel the rumble of her laughter fill me. When someone hugs me and I can feel the tremble of their body, their fingers flat against my back. When two humans are together, they can sit in silence and still disturb the violin-chords of the air in such a way that a murmur is produced. The loudest murmurs are in the greatest silences. 

“And again I hear 

These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs

With a soft inland murmur.” – William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey 

I often think about the murmurs my mother and I exchange when the night around us is crisp. The land barely murmurs. Nothing rustles. Somehow there is a peace, or perhaps an uneasy stalemate. We don’t notice. We focus on our uneven footsteps and the sandwiches we unwrap in the park. Maybe there is a pond with some ducks in it. Maybe there are some bright lamps that ring the park where the children play and laugh. Maybe some bike bells are ringing in the distance. We sit next to each other on the peeling bench. We pull out the food we have packed – some packaged snacks the size of a baby’s fist, a small plastic container of strawberries we rinsed and cut. We set the tupperwares and Ziplocs on the bench and we eat, slowly chewing. I can hear the sound of our teeth. I think of a murmur, sometimes, as a spool of thread I grip in a dark maze. No matter how big the dark feels. 

My mother and I exchange murmurs that are brief, separated by periods of silence of unpredictable duration. 

Good? 

Fresh.