7 Sounds Your Body Makes and What They Actually Mean

Imagine you’ve just eaten a big meal and are lounging on the couch when all of a sudden your stomach starts to grumble. Before you know it, you may be letting out a big belch — or perhaps worse — before snoring away while you take a food-induced nap. Stomach growls, burping, and snoring are among the many common sounds that our bodies produce. Here’s a look at seven such sounds, and exactly what they mean.

Stomach Growling

That rumbling in your tummy is known by the clinical term borborygmi. Your stomach can growl when you’re not hungry, when you are hungry, or when you just ate. The last is especially common, and these noises typically come from the small and large intestines as our bodies process food.

During digestion, the intestinal walls contract and relax in a rhythmic, wave-like pattern called peristalsis, which helps push food, liquids, and gases through the digestive tract. You can think of your digestive system as an assembly line moving your meal from one end to the other — making your body a busy, noisy factory.

You may also experience stomach rumbling due to dietary intolerances, stress, and other factors. For example, people with lactose intolerance typically have too much hydrogen and fluid swirling around in their intestines, which leads to those noisy, gurgling contractions.

Snoring

Snoring happens when the air flowing between your lungs and the relaxed tissues in your throat, causing them to vibrate. Just as vibrating air in a guitar or piano makes music, your body makes its own music — albeit likely less pleasant. (Though it’s very rare to hear yourself snoring, no matter how loud it gets.)

Snoring often worsens as you age because your body loses muscle tone, which causes the airways to shrink. Another root cause is having large tonsils, adenoids, or other similar fleshy protrusions in the throat, such as the uvula. These obstruct air movement, which leads to more intense vibrations.

Cracking Joints

Cracking your knuckles or your back can be one of life’s most satisfying pleasures. The sound comes not from your bones clacking together, but from dissolved gas that create tiny bubbles inside the synovial fluid lubricating your joints. When you crack your knuckles, it stretches your synovial joint and creates negative pressure inside, which produces a “popping” sound, similar to the sound you hear when pulling a suction cup off a surface.

Another cause of bodily creakiness is a condition called crepitus. As you age, the cartilage around your bones wears away, which results in rough surfaces around the joints. Without the natural cushion of the cartilage, this roughness causes  your joints to rub together and creak.

Sneezing

A sneeze begins with inhalation, leading to a buildup of pressure in the lungs. Once that pressure reaches a critical mass, air is forcefully expelled out of the lungs — unless you actively hold in a sneeze — and out of your nose and mouth.

Expelled air can cause that stereotypical “achoo” sound as it passes through your vocal cords. The shape and consistency of your facial structure, soft tissue in your throat, and your vocal cords all affect the tone and volume of your particular sneeze.

Passing Gas

On average, a person passes a half liter of gas every day, spread out over 14 occurrences of flatulence (farts, in other words) per day. The sound can vary, depending on several factors, including expulsion velocity.

Gas bubbles form in your intestine as a byproduct of gut bacteria or from compounds released from food you eat. As food travels through your body, it leads to a buildup of carbon dioxide, methane, hydrogen, and other gases in the intestines. When the gas bubbles leave your body, they often make a sound (unless they’re of the “silent but deadly” variety).

Burping

Belches are caused by gas escaping out of the mouth, which causes audible vibrations in the esophagus. Unlike gas that comes out the other end, which is primarily formed by digestion, gas that causes burping is usually from air that you unknowingly swallow throughout the day. You do this when eating or drinking (especially too quickly), talking while you eat, chewing gum, and in other ways.

If you push a burp out with more force, it causes the upper esophageal sphincter (a ring-shaped muscle at the top of the esophagus just below the throat) to rattle, causing a louder belching sound. But if you hold back and let the burp flow out more naturally, the vibrations will be less intense and the sound will be quieter.

Ringing Ears

Ringing in the ears can be one of the most frustrating sounds caused by the body.  This ringing is known as tinnitus, which can either be temporary or sustained for a longer period. It’s caused by damage to the tiny cells in your inner ear. These cells have even tinier hair-like structures that are moved by sound waves entering your ear, bending together like grass in the wind. 

When working properly, these cells send signals to the brain so that it can interpret the movement of the hairs as sound. But if the hair cells are damaged — whether by a few hours of loud music at a concert or simply due to aging — it impacts the brain’s ability to process sounds normally. 

To compensate, the brain essentially increases its gain, much like how you increase the volume on your TV. This hyperactivity produces ear ringing — or humming, buzzing, clicking, or whooshing sounds — because, with the gain up, the brain is hearing everything else louder too, including its own neural activity.

Depending on the severity of the damage, tinnitus can last either temporarily or indefinitely, and vary in how loud you hear it, sometimes drowning out exterior sounds. In other words, sometimes your body can be louder than everything else around you.