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Ah, thanks for asking that. It's a needle wheel pump for an older bak-pak skimmer. The skimmer itself works really well and is insanely easy to dial in. I got it free with a bad pump on it, and bought the pump that was as close as it gets to the factory replacement. I'm using the pill bottle muffler to silence the air intake, but the thing sends vibration from the motor all the way up through the skimmer body.
The sicce skimmer pumps are very quiet compared to the reef octopus skimmers I have (that use the "aquatrance" pump). At present, I have one Sicce skimmer pump in a bubble magus body (these were sold under the "Seaside Aquatics" name, and you can still get them on Amazon). It is very close to silent, but does emit a very low volume level hum that I can notice over other tank noise when I turn it off.
However, part of this is because it's immersed up to the neck in water in the sump.
Bottom line - all AC pumps will emit some degree of hum because it's the nature of the mechanics of the pump design. Correctly-designed DC pumps are very close to completely silent, but as others noted, there's a price premium on them because of the electronics needed to convert AC to DC and to permit speed control.
Were I in your situation, and the noise is loud enough to be really irritating, I'd install a sump on the tank, and get a new/used skimmer with a Sicce AC pump. A sump need not be fancy or expensive - I've several that are made of cheap, Petco dollar-a-gallon tanks. A bigger challenge would be if your tank doesn't have an overflow. While the reliability of HOB overflows have gotten a whole lot better than they used to be, they still have risks that drilled tanks don't. And, by the time you purchase and install a quality HOB overflow, it's almost worth it from a financial standpoint to simply get a new marineland tank from Petco with overflows already installed (or get a good used marineland off of craig's list - they show up all the time).