Teodoro Ilagan, Who Listened To A Hum For Thirty-One Years, Dies At 76
He solved the mystery in two years — it was a pumping station — and kept writing it down for another twenty-nine. The result is the longest single-observer acoustic record of a rural night anyone knows of.
SAN NICOLAS, Philippines — Teodoro Ilagan died on 12 July at his home in San Nicolas, Ilocos Norte. He was 76. The cause, according to the provincial civil registry, was renal failure.
Beginning in June 1994 and ending three weeks before his death, he sat on his porch at 21:00 every night and wrote down whether he could hear the hum, how loud it was on a scale he devised himself, and what the weather was doing.
The hum
It was the pumping station, four kilometres north-east, and he knew that by 1996.
He kept writing it down anyway for another twenty-nine years, which is the whole of why this obituary exists.
"People assume he was looking for a mystery," his daughter, Perlita Ilagan-Ocampo, said. "He solved the mystery in two years. He telephoned the water district and they told him the hours and he wrote it in the front of volume three. Then he carried on, because by then he had two years of data and he said it would be a waste."
What he built without meaning to
Thirty-one years, 11,146 entries, one observer, one location, one scale.
Dr. Rustom Villaflor-Baptiste, who now holds the log and has digitised twenty-eight of the thirty-one volumes, describes it as the longest continuous single-observer acoustic record of a rural night he knows of anywhere.
Its value is not the hum. It is everything the hum sat inside: three decades of an unbroken nightly note on wind, cloud, insect noise, dogs, traffic, and the arrival, around 2012, of a sound he recorded as bagong ugong — a new drone — which turns out to correspond exactly to the province's first wind turbines.
"He has given me a baseline," Villaflor-Baptiste said. "You cannot buy a baseline. You can only have written it down thirty-one years ago."
The 2011 change
The single most useful entry in the whole log is 4 March 2011, where his scale value drops by two points and stays down.
The water district, asked by this newspaper, confirmed that the station's impeller was replaced that week.
Nobody told him. He noticed, wrote it down, and put a question mark in the margin that stayed unanswered for fifteen years.
He is survived by his daughter, four grandchildren, thirty-one volumes, and a question mark that this newspaper is glad to be able to answer here.
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Sources & Method
An obituary. Cause of death from the public record. The log itself was read, in part, by this newspaper and in full by the acoustician who now holds it.
Who we spoke to
- Perlita Ilagan-Ocampo, His daughter. Interviewed by video call 20 July 2026
- Dr. Rustom Villaflor-Baptiste, Acoustician, now custodian of the log. Interviewed by video call; has digitised 28 of 31 volumes 21 July 2026
- The provincial water district, Written questions. Written response July 2026 Confirmed the pumping station's operating hours and the 2011 impeller change.
- Ilocos Norte civil registry, Public record. Record request July 2026 Cause of death recorded as renal failure.
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