Some media reports have suggested the noises were heard at 30-minute intervals.
Deep-sea experts who spoke to the BBC say it is hard to determine what these noises might be without seeing the data, and Rear Adm John Mauger - who is leading the search - has also confirmed the source of them is unknown.
But it is possible they could be short, sharp, relatively high-frequency noises, made from within the sub by hitting a hard object against the end of it.
Frank Owen, from the Submarine Institute of Australia, says he is confident - based on the information available - the sounds are coming from inside the vessel.
"If there was a 30-minute interval, it's very unlikely to be anything but human related," he told the BBC.
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But Mr Owen says the noises "smack of advice" coming from the fifth man inside - 77-year-old Paul-Henry Nargeolet, a former French navy diver and renowned explorer.
"He would know the protocol for trying to alert searching forces… on the hour and the half-hour, you bang like hell for three minutes," Mr Owen said.
Banging on the vessel's hull every half hour is standard naval protocol around the world for stricken vessels aiming to send word of their location to rescuers, Mr Owen told LBC News.
The decision to relocate the search indicates authorities are thinking similarly.
But in previous maritime searches - like those for missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 in 2014, and the Russian submarine Kursk in 2000 - underwater noises were heard too, and yielded no results.
And Rear Adm Mauger has said there are a lot of metal objects at the Titanic site that could have been causing the noises.
The other ray of hope is that these sounds were picked up by the sonar buoys - listening devices dropped from aircraft or ships - at all, Mr Owen says.
The Titanic lies 12,500ft (3,800m) beneath the ocean surface, where the buoys sit.
All forms of electromagnetic radiation, including radio and radar, are mostly useless underwater, but sound can travel fast over great distances.
It is possible that noises from deep ocean layers could get through to the sonar buoys, Mr Owen says, but it is more likely that the sounds are coming from the same ocean layer.
"It is very difficult to hear noise below the [top] layer because the sound gets refracted by this drop in temperature.
"But when it's in that isothermal layer... between the surface and 180m... the sound behaves really quite straight."
Mr Owen says if the sounds are indeed coming from the sub, rescuers should be able to
locate it pretty quickly.
"[They can] lay a pattern of buoys around that area, so they can get cross-bearings."
"The sonar buoys' receiver is able to plot that sort of information really very quickly... it would take a very short time to find."
Experts say that if one sonar buoy has picked up the sounds, they could locate them to about 1-2km (0.6-1.2 miles). And if more have picked them up, it could be possible to narrow the search area down to 100m.
However, the underwater vehicles which have been sent to find the origin of the noise have so far not found anything, the Coast Guard said at a news conference on Wednesday.
There are two remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs) currently searching and several more were expected by Thursday morning, the Coast Guard said.