Living close to a noisy road, I play white noise on Spotify every night. Usually though I just go with a playlist or one/few particular tracks running in a loop.
Why would anyone go for a podcast rather than a playlist/track?
I also wonder if Spotify somehow adjust the earnings of these creators, as obviously I don't actually listen to their white noise for the whole night.
> you have to pay for YouTube premium to play audio while the screen is off
There are many sleep videos which have a dark screen for this reason, you can add "dark screen" to the search terms and see the choices. Although it's not quite the same as having the screen off, it's close enough in my experience.
I'm not a white noise podcast listener, so it's just a guess:
Discovering new white noises? Washing machine, hair dryer, forest, see, bar, wind, workplace noises?
For work, I could see that I would like to experiment with different variations of white noise sounds, and see which one helps me the most to concentrate. I'll try out this podcast on Monday.
This is like how white light has all frequencies of (visible) light. There are other "colours" of noise too, like pink noise and blue noise, that have different mixes of frequencies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_noise
I know it is not technically white noise (it's just relaxing noise, really), but I appreciate your comment, noise colors are a fun subject.
My sloppiness came from the fact that, as I have seen, in the YouTube noise video world, 95% of the videos have the "white" label in the title, even if they aren't technically white.
I was going to point out that if 10 hours isn't enough, just play it back at 3/4 speed, 1/2 speed or 1/4 speed. White noise should still be white noise at different speeds.
But it turns out that slowing down white noise on Google does change it noticeably. Speeding it up does not.
Someone smarter than me could probably infer some things about how YouTube implements speed shifting from that.
> Why would anyone go for a podcast rather than a playlist/track?
I'm also curious about this. My guess is the monetisation is different and podcasts are way more lucrative. - tracks are paid by plays straight from Spotify but (I think) podcasts instead rely on advertisements.
From the article
> Anchor manages the commercial load and pays Moore $12.25 per thousand listens
which works out to ~$0.012 per listen
And from the top result on Google for "how much does spotify pay per stream"
> $0.0033 to $0.0054. That's how much money Spotify paid artists (through their rights holders) per stream in 2021, according to Insider. That means it would take roughly 250 streams for an artist to earn $1.
Also maybe the advertising value varies considerably with the number of podcast listeners and the specific advertisers partnered with, whereas the track stream amounts are probably pretty static.
My guess would be that ads are incompatible with white noise use cases. If the white noise “podcast” inserted ads, I would guess that people would find a different place to get white noise.
From the article, some are subscription, some play ads at the beginning, and the last creator featured has chosen not to include ads even though he knows he's leaving money on the table in doing so.
"Moore and his white noise team... offer a subscription plan. But most people listen to the free, ad-supported version. Because Moore doesn’t want to interrupt the calming aura of his show, he opts to include only pre-roll ads."
"Reed, who is something of a white noise purist, knows he could make good money with advertisements. But he doesn’t include them because he worries the sound of commerce would disturb his audience’s restful slumber.
'It’s embarrassing to say how much money I would be making,' he said."
I love this kind of passion, when people do things the right way, completely ignoring the advertising devil's offers - "look at all the riches I will give to you, if you only allow advertisement". Some things simply don't have a pricetag. Without people like this, world would be a dystopia a long time ago.
I’m surprised Spotify doesn’t have home grown white noise sounds, and then pushes people to those “songs”, makes them short with 0s hapless playback, and then pays itself rather than a music label.
It's an interesting question. Obviously creators will favor podcasts since it allows them to shove ads back in, even for Spotify paid subscribers. But why people chose that over playlists is a mystery.
"obviously" -- speaking as someone who has run a box fan from sleep til waking every night for over 15 years, I would not say that is obvious at all. I don't need it to fall asleep, but I need it to stay asleep.
Spotify clearly has set internal goals around podcast adoption and has been pushing them on users for a while (I assume because of the extra margin of playing ads to “ad free” premium subscribers), so it makes sense they’d get some kind of a boost in the results.
Yup. Having people listen to a white noise generator as a "podcast" rather than a "playlist" certainly improves their "Look how well our podcasts are doing!" numbers.
Taylor Swift's next album will probably be released as a podcast...
> Why would anyone go for a podcast rather than a playlist/track?
I'm not sure but I think tracks have a length limit, and not podcasts. If you want a track that lasts 8 hours as some of these do, then podcasts are the only option.
Almost sounds like what Vulfpeck did with the Sleepify album back in the earlier days of Spotify, while serving more of a purpose than "just give this band some money"
Society values investment strategies and medical innovations. If society finds out it has been defrauded, then society tries to reclaim its investments and punish the fraudsters.
To be fair, there are millions of farmers around the world and only a handful of white noise producers. Moreover, each white noise producer seems to be serving hundreds of thousands of people. Economy of scale is a thing.
The farmers didn't earn the $18k, and splitting it between them all wouldn't change anything for them. As ridiculous as it is to sell white noise for a living, it's a logical consequence of the kind of world that allows so many of us here on HN to make a living selling little bits of symbolic logic arranged in patterns.
This is Exhibit A of how awful social media can be: low effort, wrong, lack of nuance comment that invokes fake outrage and aims at stirring emotion from an wound up audience
> Moore and his white noise team — yes, he has five employees and contractors
I assume their duties are mostly mundane things, such as accounting, marketing, vendor relations, and app (store) maintenance.
But what I really like to imagine is that those five employees are cryptographers, and that their duty is to painstakingly work on new secure white noise generation algorithms in order to push the envelope in the white noise industry.
Surely you mean newer? The quantum tunneling artifacts on modern dense memory are simply ghastly, which why I stick to hand-wound magnetic core memory.
The Haters usually take a microphone connected to a distortion box and scrape it around the surface of a textured plastic suitcase. The result is clearly white noise and easily differentiated from the all too common pink noise one tends to hear nowadays.
"Yes yes, of course that's a nice balance, but I do rather prefer mine to have just a hint of oak leaf crackle, like those that remain at the end of the Fall"
Well, honestly there's a world of difference between the noise generated by Pete Swanson versus Merzbow for example. I can't handle Merzbow at all, but Pete Swanson's A&Ox0 I truly enjoy. For example, my most listend song over 2021 (>60 times) is Limited Space by an alias of Pete Swanson; Yellow Swans.
Than there's a track like Treetop Drive 3 from Deathprod that you truly notice when it starts, and when it ends. Other than that it is phenomal in drowning out everything on the other end.
Windy & Carl also make some great tracks, one of my favorites being Antarctica.
I've noticed while sharing these tracks that it is a very personnel thing, so odds being that you share my favorites are remarkebly small, though I do find it a very interesting genre to explore and wonder about - what makes this good versus the other?
With less noise and a seeming one-off is Virginia Waveform from Pan-America, though quire more melodic already
I find it fascinating as well, especially how I can scroll through a recommended ambient playlist provided by Spotify and only pick 1-2 songs from the lot.
And on further exploration I often think to myself - damn, this is some good ambient, let me add it to my list - only to find I've added it already. Kinda proving to me that it's not just circumstantial appreciation but something that stays for a while I guess.
Wow, this is the first time I see someone with musical tastes so close to mine. Like you said, a lot of this music feels very personal. So this feels weird now, like meeting a long lost twin. I could have made that playlist.
I was never really able to pinpoint what makes this music good to me. It has to be a mix of the actual sound, texture and repetitive nature of the drone.
Ohhh this must be marvelous and can't wait to check it out! I really appreciate this tune from Fennesz - Tom but have a really hard time with both the brevity of the tune, and finding similar styles.
On another note. Do you know the project The Dead Texan? its another alias from the artist behind Stars of the Lid and it's an album that just seems to get better with every listen.
Especially the Aegina Airlines is very evoking, though not directly up the alley of Noise I'd say.
This does suggest a moderately interesting application: a sleep tracker could provide feedback to selectively alter the composition of the background noise to improve sleep quality. It could vary the background noise based on your sleep phase and other ambient noise (sirens, pets, etc). If you wear a tracker while awake, such as an apple watch, it could even figure out how to start based on your activity level just before going to bed.
Hey, I've used this show to act as my own sound machine when trying to nap! Some nights are the kids are terrible sleepers, so my wife and I take turns napping during the day while the other watches the kids. As you might imagine, they're loud - the white noise helps block out the extra noise.
The problem with Netflix, Disney+, HBO, etc etc is that a lot of people are going back to pirating video content or abusing their "family" accounts, all because each platform insists on having exclusive content. If this trend continues, I think we'll see a more and more dramatic loss for all video streaming services as piracy becomes mainstream again (as it was for decades).
I don't think that the music streaming platforms should follow their example, but instead should all offer as much content as possible and simply compete for listening experience, not content. I know that there is already a battle going on for exclusive music content, but I'd say about 90% of music can be found on all the major music streaming platforms right now.
Sure, it's possible but there are plenty of gaps where its random noise - but even a very very weak signal would be swamped with noise if the radio is in FM mode.
Pure radio static is the sound of the universe! Very frequency dependent - the higher up in frequency (or shorter the wavelength) the more of it is cosmic in nature - point a microwave radio dish towards/away from the sun and hear the difference, or even down towards the ground to hear the sky/earth noise. [1]
I personally find a clear spot between military submarine stations in the low frequency 10-60 KHz range quite relaxing to listen to as it's a mix of random noise and thunder static.
One thing I didn't realise till recently, is you don't need spotify to generate white noise if you have an iPhone/iPad, as it's an in-built function under accessibility --> Audio/Visual and background sounds.
Odd thing to blame the youth for. Losing, or having stolen from them? The people on this site who make these things are the ones making those decisions, if you expect a 14 year old to take hard ethical stances on theoretical privacy rights you are crazy.
What’s strange is that iOS gives you no indication of where that sound is coming from…I guess I expected to be able to pause it somehow. Interesting, though!
As someone who suffers from a rather high sensitivity to noise (particularly noise I do not have a control over) this is game changing and will 100x my quality of life
In this case they're probably recordings, but you could imagine that they'd be procedurally generated in which case not necessarily. A call to `Math.random()` is a finite length 'file' but won't repeat.
In theory one can construct a chaotic (this is a precise definition) function with very little data that could replicate that class of noise with finite data.
Infinite lists are also another beautiful construct in lazily evaluated languages.
Not at a fixed rate with finite computing power or finite memory. Essentially a fixed algorithm needs ever increasing or infinite levels of precision in it’s calculations to avoid loops.
> Not at a fixed rate with finite computing power or finite memory. Essentially a fixed algorithm needs ever increasing or infinite levels of precision in its calculations to avoid loops.
If you start talking about true “infinity” then sure. You need to store enough state (or if you like, receive some input) for your computed output to be unique. And counting to infinity takes infinite amounts of memory. Infinity is not accessible to humans, and is best thought of as a thought experiment rather than a part of empirical reality.
But if you do 44kHz samples, a counter stored in a 32-bit integer that ticks up once per sample is enough state to give you all unique [i.e. non-looping] samples for about a day. A 64-bit integer will give you all unique samples for 13 million years. With a 75-bit integer you can get all unique samples for longer than the history of the universe so far.
So in practice, the “increasing” amount of memory required doesn’t (necessarily) grow fast enough to worry about.
Or if you have any device with a web browser, since there are a zillion free sites for generating white noise. Here's an arbitrary top search result which appears to be a highly configurable noise generator: https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/whiteNoiseGenerator.php
MyNoise is a really high quality, well maintained website run by a single person. He even goes out and does his own field recordings. I highly recommend it.
The fact that the site author literally travels around the world and records noises makes it so much more interesting to me that your average digitally-generated-white-noise app.
This is awesome! Is it bad that my mind immediately went to how to use it to prank someone? Turn on white noise and then turn on "only when unlocked" and set it to a really low volume.
Drive someone nuts trying to figure out why it seems like they hear a noise every time they unlock their phone.
I won't do this though because I'm pretty sure it would be a violation of the Geneva conventions.
I have a ‘LectroFan, it’s just a little box with a bunch of fan/white noises in it. From what I remember it generates them vs just playing an audio clip on a loop. I prefer it to running something on my phone for 8 hours at a time.
I also have a mini one for when I travel, which has a battery and can double as a BT speaker. I do sometimes forget this when I travel, especially for short trips, so the iPhone feature is a good reminder. I think I heard about it before, but without using it, it’s easy to forget.
I've worked my A$$ of literally for over 5 years now to put music on Spotify, through out those 5 years, I have about 30 songs up there, All in all I've probably only gotten about 1,400 streams generating about $20... I'm lucky I taught myself web development and project management, because with all the promise the Internet had when I was going through college, it seems that the only actual opportunity is in creating web sites and apps.
Fairness is simply not possible on these platforms, you can have the most polished product and sit totally ignored because of all the scams and schemes, I can't imagine how many people who don't have alternative opportunities like I did that are literally dying just trying to get a chance to be heard on a fiasco operation like this that literally and happily pays others to do absolutely nothing, while they charge creators for subscriptions and ads.
It's a really frickin bleak indicator as to the value of human labor going into the future... If the people who aren't providing value constantly win over the people that strive to, everything falls apart, and we'll end up in a total scheme economy.
As valid creators, we all need to back off and stop posting anything at all on social media and big platforms to highlight the total crap that is popular on the platform. A much better way is to create and maintain our own small independent sites and to link to each other more.
You can literally run a fan or leave a radio on a dead frequency to get white noise... You don't need a streaming service for that. This is ridiculous, and the article only serves to promote this brand of fraud. It's not capitalism, it's simply fraud from many facets.
Even if their music is good it’s hard to get discovered in a world of millions (billions?) of tracks. Unless you’re lucky, you’ll need to do some marketing of some sort to pull in listeners.
Marketing is indeed a necessity, but Social Media was developed under the premise of providing free "social" marketing for artists that aren't profiting from their work yet... These platforms have undermined that now into requiring absolutely all artists to pay for ads in order to be viewed, which is completely contradicting their original EULAs... Spotify in a way is a social platform, but more-so it is also a marketing platform that despite allowing people to promote, also creates a dynamic where success is tiered and artificially hard-limited by their algorithms.
Content displayed on the front pages of sites like Spotify, YouTube, Reddit (etc.), get the most views and plays. These sites intentionally only have front pages, with pre-designated featured content. That means that only the artists that land there get the lion share of the revenue from those sites... They provide little to no relative potential for success or visibility to the majority of artists that contribute content that they benefit from, and that makes the entire industry a pyramid scheme.
Unknown and unsponsored artists cannot succeed in this model, and even if they do somehow find an opportunity, they are often subject to predatory contracts from record labels and the larger industry as well. It's really insane what goes on behind the curtains.
The ones I've seen get noticed and gain a big audiance have done so by making entertaining music videos that poeple share and post to Reddit and other places. Lil Dicky is a great example of that. He made a mixtape in his bedroom using GarageBand, then made a bunch of videos for YouTube. Many of them went viral... or at least viral enough to fund his Kickstarter for his first full album.
Tom MacDonald is another (without getting into any politics). He makes a ton of videos and his songs have content that makes people want to share them. He had several songs hit the Billboard Hot 100 last year according to Wikipedia. I don't think he was even on steaming until recently due to a collaboration, just YouTube and selling physical CDs himself. He won't sign any of those predatory contracts, so things may be more difficult, but actually owning your music has it's value.
Both of these examples had a mix of hard work, talent, and luck, but that doesn't seem differnet than pre-social media when people were trying to get a record deal. Eminem just happened to hand his CD to a guy who worked with Jimmy Iovine after the Rap Olympics, had he not done that... who knows if we'd know who he is (I think it was the interview with Mike Tyson where he talked about this). If you've watched Jeen-Yuhs on Netflix, it shows no one wanted to give Kanye a chance as a rapper. Even though he was in the business, everyone just saw him as a producer, not a rapper. He had to push hard and keep asking for people to give him shot and got lucky one day when somene let him to a verse (I think Jay-Z). Jay-Z is another... no one would give him a deal, so he started selling his own stuff and made his own label (from what I remember hearing).
Breaking into the music business as a top artist as never been easy. It seems like the differnce now is the barriers are down, so it's more about getting people to listen instead of getting an record executive to like your stuff. It's hard to now if the market is any more crowded or if it's just that the consumers have full access now, instead of having to go through the gatekeepers.
"Social Media was developed under the premise of providing free "social" marketing for artists that aren't profiting from their work yet..."
I don't remember this. It might've been a bullet point in some fantastical interpretation of potential, but you'd have to be naive to think this was how it would play out. Doesn't take much thinking to see that every free platform gets overrun with hopefuls and spam and the platforms need a way to either rank content or monetise it.
Spotify and co provide distribution, not marketing. If it was as trivial as "create social music platform, get coverage for my music", you and every artist could do it, right?
> If the people who aren't providing value constantly win over the people that strive to
Not that I don't sympathize with your struggles, but aren't the people who are creating background noise tracks doing exactly that, providing value? The article talks about tracks with natural noise or ambient noises, so it's not exactly the same as turning a fan on. I can't see how this is a scam.
Also from the article, there's a team of five making some of these, so it's not even accurate to label them as low effort (though I'll admit they're probably admin and marketing roles...).
> I have about 30 songs up there, All in all I've probably only gotten about 1,400 streams
That's only 46 listens per song. That suggests to me that you're not self-promoting, or doing something wrong. Even if there weren't white noise tracks on Spotify with 100k listens, there are millions of songs with <100 listens; even if the Spotify exposure algorithms were "fair" you wouldn't get any more listens than you already have.
You didn't have to take it in a personal insult direction friend. It's such a common response to an issue you really do not understand.
I'll refrain from salty comments concerning the quality of my work because you're already sold on the ideal that the platform is totally ethical, despite many well selling artists saying the same things I have numerous times.
The platforms exist to promote artists, they do not do that at all.
It's really not for me to defend the merits of my work in response to expressing my experience on the platform... It's really not for you to insult someone you know nothing about, who says they've worked hard. You should really think about that... I have solid success in many other places than Spotify, and that's why I dedicate my time there and not to Spotify.
I find it odd that you seem rather adamant on the skill that goes into your own music, yet seem to disregard the noise genre as a whole and call it unfair that it gets that much attention. Indeed the world is not fair, but to discredit other peoples work that a lot of others seem to appreciate seems as a moot point.
I listen to a lot of music, mostly noise / ambient / drone and do so mostly during work, so the hours stack up quite rapidly. Per the Spotify model this is quite beneficial for the artist. But I am rather picky in the noise I appreciate so in the end it’s not that many songs I keep. Most I visit once and turn off halfway. So I definitely wouldn’t want to call it easy to create good ambient / noise.
Anyway the other day I saw a YouTube video with 116M views of 9 minutes long that showed hands going into slime. Now compared with a video from say Carfection or PBS EON, that’s quite odd than.
I never commented on the overall quality of the ambient drone genre... I don't know where you got that unimportant idea?
There are people literally recording ceiling fans and then putting it on Spotify, and using low-effort production techniques like play bots to steal royalties from hard working artists. That's what I'm referring to. The only way that Spotify can really fix that is to rely less on algorithms, ban payola, and bring back real curators... But for the sake of their profit, that's not likely to ever happen.
This article is about a platform of hundreds of thousands of artists (or more) and you're using 2-3 artists you loosely observed to say that everything is fair. Thats not a real conversation at all rooted in fact. Far off the topic of making it about me.
I worked at a record store in the 90's. It was right after cd's took over. I think we had 1 record in the store.
I was shocked over the amount of tranquility music we sold. Tranquility was nature sounds. I didn't know about white noise back then, but we probally had it. It was basically music produced cheaply that supposedly relazed people.
I got it. People are stressed. Did listening to calming nature sounds help me--no, but listening to AM radio on a boring station does calm me down, or keeps negative thoughts away.
My sleepy time music was Classic music. Pretty much everything.
Even then becoming a musician was as hard as becomming an artist. There was just no formula besides 1 in a million talent, like Elvis, or just sheer luck, and that meant exposure.
(I am thinking about leaving an old iphone strapped to a tree to record creek sounds tomorrow, and plop it on Spotify under "Songs to calm. Natural, and organic music."), or never leave my house and produce it digitally?)
> My sleepy time music was Classic music. Pretty much everything.
I never had luck with that to be honest.
I’ve tried all classical playlists including all “Classical for Sleep”. It’s just too emotional with a lot of peaks and crescendos. A lot of treble. Demands a lot of attention to itself.
“Sleepy” jazz on the other hand is often comforting, muted and warm.
I never expected to find a feature like that in the settings menu of an operating system. Is there any history to this? How’d a white noise generator end up in the official Apple accessibility settings?
The idea of having a setting that makes my phone emit continuous noise until I turn it off is absolutely wild to me.
I didn't mean for that phrase to be flippant. I literally just meant whatever reasons there are. There's plenty of good ones. Some people are mute, some people have speech issues, etc.
How does this make sense when I also hear many artists hate it because they get very little per play? Or is it because people play it continuously on a loop in ways you wouldn't play EDM or rap that's 3-10 min?
(Paywalled so difficult to respond to more than the headline.)
Just moved back to the countryside, this article makes me think about hooking up some microphones in the woods and catching the progression of birds into frogs into rain sounds into birds that happens every night. Certainly a big part of why I moved out of the city, and you could have a new "episode" every day.
>this article makes me think about hooking up some microphones in the woods and catching the progression of birds into frogs into rain sounds into birds that happens every night...and you could have a new "episode" every day.
I absolutely would listen to that nearly every work day.
Pre-pandemic, I would use 'Forrest Bathing' YT channels mixed in with my favorite music while in the office. The longer the sample of ambient sounds, the better, as I wouldn't have to pause or restart the video. I've kept this up since WFH started.
After months of daily listening, I found that a lot of 'Forrest Bathing' channels would use soundboards, would loop an hour long sample for 10+ hours, would splice in other samples from other places (I could tell from the bird species' calls), etc.
The authentic, 10+ hour long, sampled from a single spot, aurally interesting, no edits, no soundboards, 'Forrest Bathing' videos are very rare [0] and I wish there would be more of them.
The key would be to find aurally interesting areas around you. I've found that the fauna tend to be most active crepuscularly, meaning that the middle of the video can be a bit boring, especially for night videos. Day videos can have animal husbandry to fill in the gaps during mid-day.
Part of the allure of the videos is the 'romance' of the associated visual components. If you can set a video camera up along with the high quality audio, that's just golden. Even though I'm almost never looking at the video, just knowing that I am actually listening to the real sounds of the Yukon, or the Amafi Coast, or a small English hedge, etc, it really makes it for me and makes me feel like that small little box I'm in isn't so bad, that I am actually traveling the world a bit still, that my life is richer and more 'real' in some small way.
[0] I've found a few channels, and even then, the 'good' videos are very few. Yes, I am super picky with this, I can't help it.
I was trying to find a picture of these where two of them are butted up against each other & you lie down inbetween them, sort of like a pair of headphones. SEO made it so I couldn’t do that, so this article is the best we get.
It can be a good habit in various environments (including urban) when travelling. You can get some of those vibes that give a place its feel, beyond the visuals, scents, etc. Doesn't need to be high-quality if it's just something you keep as a memory.
I did it a few times many years ago when going around the world. Then regret not doing it in a few others on subsequent trips (call to prayer in Morocco, pub noise in Lijiang's bar street, etc).
For my uses there is always too much additional nonsense with noise apps. Here's 5 lines of Faust that satisfies all my noise requirements (a noise generator and a lp filter with simple UI) you can export as ab android app or to various other platforms: https://faustide.grame.fr/?autorun=1&voices=0&name=exfaust0&...
Examples: type sleep noise into the android Play store and the top few. Waves, bird noises, rain etc. All useless to me - just want masking noise to block other stuff out.
I use so-called analog or mechanical sound machines like the Marpac or Yogasleep Dohm, so not much use for other noise generation stuff. But every now and then I use an app when I don't have my machines, which I sometimes travel with.
By definition a white noise podcast cannot play ads. So these have to purely paid podcasts. It’s interesting to learn that there are quite a few people that want a different sound or a variety of sounds every night to sleep. That is because I am guessing that is what the podcast provides of value.
I had an annoying experience attempting to play white noise on an echo speaker for the kids recently: Alexa wouldn't play white noise without an Amazon music premium account. It kept prompting me to pay for the premium service.
Granted I'm pretty sure I can get it to play white noise on a different music service but I think it's ridiculous that they would charge for noise.
Social safety nets in a capitalist society don’t make a country closer to socialism. Same with decent worker rights. Neoliberalism has done a huge shift into pushing the world towards capitalism. I don’t think the state needs to own the means of production to be socialist. At the very least 50% of private companies should be co-ops to be called more socialist than capitalist.
I use noise before sleeping due to some mild tinnitus. I tried the Alexa/Spotify approach for a while, but didn't like the gaps between the tracks or anything else that would make me take notice of the background sound.
I ended up repurposing an old Android tablet hooked up to a cheap USB powered speaker bar through the headphone jack of the tablet. It runs the White Noise app, and I go for sea/waves types of sound. I keep the tablet offline in airplane mode with a very short display-off setting. The sound can loop continuously, or you can set it to switch off after a certain time.
It's been really great every night for the last few years. I did research some sort of sleep machine box on Amazon, but it's surprisingly difficult to find something that doesn't want to shine bright status LEDs into your darkened bedroom, or other annoying things.
Has anyone figured out a free or one time payment way to get white noise on Amazon Echo ? It's such a pain that I have to make a looping playlist with white noise and program it into a routine. It mostly works but not reliable
A plug for my favorite noise sleep aid, Celestial Noise. A very warm noise with a special quality that I find so much nicer than noise generators, though I recommend downloading so you skip being woken up by ads. The comments are a bonus.
I avoid Spotify as a podcast app because of their ad injection system. I think that any white noise apps would be super bad with loud ads stuck into random spots.
Why not just pay for it? I understand being annoyed by the free product in its regular use cases, but wanting the free version of the app to give you a flawless experience from something as specific as playing white noise during the night evokes something in me that I cannot really put a word on.
Because the apple podcast app is free and, while pretty bed, gives me the same podcasts without ads.
It’s not that I want the free version of Spotify to do something, I would rather use other tools that are free or already paid for.
Separately from this, charging a monthly fee for a white noise app seems like a horrible value and something that everyone should avoid and just use an algorithmic source with a one time fee or is just free. I know that people are free to spend on whatever they like but it seems we’re far into “fool and his money are soon parted” territory.
Well, there are ads in the premium version Podcasts too (they seem to be only on a few "Spotify Exclusive" ones that they threw cash at for the moment).
I can put up with it as there is maybe one or two I listen to regularly with Spotify ads, but if they go much further it's a solid reason to drop the Premium subscription.
If the white noise is in the Music section you will be ad free though.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadWhy would anyone go for a podcast rather than a playlist/track?
I also wonder if Spotify somehow adjust the earnings of these creators, as obviously I don't actually listen to their white noise for the whole night.
This is the biggest mystery to me too. Why not just use a 10-hour-long (or whatever) YouTube clip?
YouTube is also a worse choice if you want offline access, such as on an airplane or when camping
NewPipe (from fdroid repositories) can play audio from YouTube while the screen is off.
This functionality is in no way specific to Brave browser.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro...
There are many sleep videos which have a dark screen for this reason, you can add "dark screen" to the search terms and see the choices. Although it's not quite the same as having the screen off, it's close enough in my experience.
Discovering new white noises? Washing machine, hair dryer, forest, see, bar, wind, workplace noises?
For work, I could see that I would like to experiment with different variations of white noise sounds, and see which one helps me the most to concentrate. I'll try out this podcast on Monday.
Those are noise, but not white noise. White noise has all frequencies at equal intensity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_noise
This is like how white light has all frequencies of (visible) light. There are other "colours" of noise too, like pink noise and blue noise, that have different mixes of frequencies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_noise
My sloppiness came from the fact that, as I have seen, in the YouTube noise video world, 95% of the videos have the "white" label in the title, even if they aren't technically white.
But it turns out that slowing down white noise on Google does change it noticeably. Speeding it up does not.
Someone smarter than me could probably infer some things about how YouTube implements speed shifting from that.
I'm also curious about this. My guess is the monetisation is different and podcasts are way more lucrative. - tracks are paid by plays straight from Spotify but (I think) podcasts instead rely on advertisements.
From the article
> Anchor manages the commercial load and pays Moore $12.25 per thousand listens
which works out to ~$0.012 per listen
And from the top result on Google for "how much does spotify pay per stream"
> $0.0033 to $0.0054. That's how much money Spotify paid artists (through their rights holders) per stream in 2021, according to Insider. That means it would take roughly 250 streams for an artist to earn $1.
Also maybe the advertising value varies considerably with the number of podcast listeners and the specific advertisers partnered with, whereas the track stream amounts are probably pretty static.
"Moore and his white noise team... offer a subscription plan. But most people listen to the free, ad-supported version. Because Moore doesn’t want to interrupt the calming aura of his show, he opts to include only pre-roll ads."
"Reed, who is something of a white noise purist, knows he could make good money with advertisements. But he doesn’t include them because he worries the sound of commerce would disturb his audience’s restful slumber.
'It’s embarrassing to say how much money I would be making,' he said."
Taylor Swift's next album will probably be released as a podcast...
I'm not sure but I think tracks have a length limit, and not podcasts. If you want a track that lasts 8 hours as some of these do, then podcasts are the only option.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepify
Regulation by companies is so refreshing compared to being regulated by the government!
"random dude can retire in peace by uploading a white noise on spotify"
Rather look at who they actually pay more.
Conform, consume, follow or ...simply die.
That's our era's motto.
You're joking right? It's not fair. It's capitalism.
Clearly, Im projecting.
Farming has its wealthy members too
also farming machines make some pretty nice noise so maybe they should get it on it.
I assume their duties are mostly mundane things, such as accounting, marketing, vendor relations, and app (store) maintenance.
But what I really like to imagine is that those five employees are cryptographers, and that their duty is to painstakingly work on new secure white noise generation algorithms in order to push the envelope in the white noise industry.
(Seriously, I wonder what the rate would be?)
"Mmmmmm, this one features a nice static base noise livivified by a hint of perlin noise."
Than there's a track like Treetop Drive 3 from Deathprod that you truly notice when it starts, and when it ends. Other than that it is phenomal in drowning out everything on the other end.
Windy & Carl also make some great tracks, one of my favorites being Antarctica. I've noticed while sharing these tracks that it is a very personnel thing, so odds being that you share my favorites are remarkebly small, though I do find it a very interesting genre to explore and wonder about - what makes this good versus the other?
With less noise and a seeming one-off is Virginia Waveform from Pan-America, though quire more melodic already
I have a curated playlist of noise tracks that I very frequently get back to. Here's my playlist for anyone that is interested: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0srqN53JGNoqEN3vzoviJU
This is my first time listening to this "genre" of music and I love it!
I was never really able to pinpoint what makes this music good to me. It has to be a mix of the actual sound, texture and repetitive nature of the drone.
Have you heard the collaboration between Fennesz and Jim O'Rourke? https://christianfenneszjimorourke.bandcamp.com/track/i-just...
https://open.spotify.com/track/2iHvSdltCRLlCVYAjRxLNj
On another note. Do you know the project The Dead Texan? its another alias from the artist behind Stars of the Lid and it's an album that just seems to get better with every listen.
Especially the Aegina Airlines is very evoking, though not directly up the alley of Noise I'd say.
Developing an algorithm that generates something that sounds very good to humans requires a bit more than simple math and entropy.
"White noise" is just the entrance to a very large rabbit hole.
written in BrainFuck I assume https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31585371
Or may NSA workers running the modern equivalent of number stations.
Spotify is the platform, not the artist. They make money as long as people are publishing content. They don't need do make anything of their own...
I don't think that the music streaming platforms should follow their example, but instead should all offer as much content as possible and simply compete for listening experience, not content. I know that there is already a battle going on for exclusive music content, but I'd say about 90% of music can be found on all the major music streaming platforms right now.
Pure radio static is the sound of the universe! Very frequency dependent - the higher up in frequency (or shorter the wavelength) the more of it is cosmic in nature - point a microwave radio dish towards/away from the sun and hear the difference, or even down towards the ground to hear the sky/earth noise. [1]
I personally find a clear spot between military submarine stations in the low frequency 10-60 KHz range quite relaxing to listen to as it's a mix of random noise and thunder static.
Go VLF or ELF for earth sounds;
https://theinspireproject.org/default.asp?contentID=17
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_noise
And they have a spotify channel: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1gRJBUyCeihBrgcCtDdEfv
What’s strange is that iOS gives you no indication of where that sound is coming from…I guess I expected to be able to pause it somehow. Interesting, though!
https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT212775
Interesting to note the size of the samples that Apple is using:
* Balanced noise: 1.8MB
* Bright noise: 1.8MB
* Dark noise: 1.8MB
* Ocean: 62.4MB
* Rain: 63.7MB
* Stream: 72.1MB
That's a lot of effort to ensure your background water sounds are (presumably) high fidelity and non-repeating!
So it doesn't matter whether a sequence is finite or not.
And the size of those files implies they are probably minutes in length, at the very least, so you probably don't notice the repetition.
In theory one can construct a chaotic (this is a precise definition) function with very little data that could replicate that class of noise with finite data.
Infinite lists are also another beautiful construct in lazily evaluated languages.
Doesn't need much to generate. It would need a wide counter but a MB is a lot of bits.
If you start talking about true “infinity” then sure. You need to store enough state (or if you like, receive some input) for your computed output to be unique. And counting to infinity takes infinite amounts of memory. Infinity is not accessible to humans, and is best thought of as a thought experiment rather than a part of empirical reality.
But if you do 44kHz samples, a counter stored in a 32-bit integer that ticks up once per sample is enough state to give you all unique [i.e. non-looping] samples for about a day. A 64-bit integer will give you all unique samples for 13 million years. With a 75-bit integer you can get all unique samples for longer than the history of the universe so far.
So in practice, the “increasing” amount of memory required doesn’t (necessarily) grow fast enough to worry about.
I saw this trick and used it to animate different parts of an animation (each part every p frames, where p is a prime) and it works very well.
[0] https://mynoise.net/Albums/view.php?album=NoiseColors
[1] https://open.spotify.com/album/4nxNOcgs2BNBYL7k7ywR5n
1. mixing "white rain" with "88 keys" to focus at work
2. downloaded an hour-long "white rain" to use as background noise for my newborn
The fact that the site author literally travels around the world and records noises makes it so much more interesting to me that your average digitally-generated-white-noise app.
Drive someone nuts trying to figure out why it seems like they hear a noise every time they unlock their phone.
I won't do this though because I'm pretty sure it would be a violation of the Geneva conventions.
I also have a mini one for when I travel, which has a battery and can double as a BT speaker. I do sometimes forget this when I travel, especially for short trips, so the iPhone feature is a good reminder. I think I heard about it before, but without using it, it’s easy to forget.
Fairness is simply not possible on these platforms, you can have the most polished product and sit totally ignored because of all the scams and schemes, I can't imagine how many people who don't have alternative opportunities like I did that are literally dying just trying to get a chance to be heard on a fiasco operation like this that literally and happily pays others to do absolutely nothing, while they charge creators for subscriptions and ads.
It's a really frickin bleak indicator as to the value of human labor going into the future... If the people who aren't providing value constantly win over the people that strive to, everything falls apart, and we'll end up in a total scheme economy.
As valid creators, we all need to back off and stop posting anything at all on social media and big platforms to highlight the total crap that is popular on the platform. A much better way is to create and maintain our own small independent sites and to link to each other more.
You can literally run a fan or leave a radio on a dead frequency to get white noise... You don't need a streaming service for that. This is ridiculous, and the article only serves to promote this brand of fraud. It's not capitalism, it's simply fraud from many facets.
Marketing is indeed a necessity, but Social Media was developed under the premise of providing free "social" marketing for artists that aren't profiting from their work yet... These platforms have undermined that now into requiring absolutely all artists to pay for ads in order to be viewed, which is completely contradicting their original EULAs... Spotify in a way is a social platform, but more-so it is also a marketing platform that despite allowing people to promote, also creates a dynamic where success is tiered and artificially hard-limited by their algorithms.
Content displayed on the front pages of sites like Spotify, YouTube, Reddit (etc.), get the most views and plays. These sites intentionally only have front pages, with pre-designated featured content. That means that only the artists that land there get the lion share of the revenue from those sites... They provide little to no relative potential for success or visibility to the majority of artists that contribute content that they benefit from, and that makes the entire industry a pyramid scheme.
Unknown and unsponsored artists cannot succeed in this model, and even if they do somehow find an opportunity, they are often subject to predatory contracts from record labels and the larger industry as well. It's really insane what goes on behind the curtains.
Tom MacDonald is another (without getting into any politics). He makes a ton of videos and his songs have content that makes people want to share them. He had several songs hit the Billboard Hot 100 last year according to Wikipedia. I don't think he was even on steaming until recently due to a collaboration, just YouTube and selling physical CDs himself. He won't sign any of those predatory contracts, so things may be more difficult, but actually owning your music has it's value.
Both of these examples had a mix of hard work, talent, and luck, but that doesn't seem differnet than pre-social media when people were trying to get a record deal. Eminem just happened to hand his CD to a guy who worked with Jimmy Iovine after the Rap Olympics, had he not done that... who knows if we'd know who he is (I think it was the interview with Mike Tyson where he talked about this). If you've watched Jeen-Yuhs on Netflix, it shows no one wanted to give Kanye a chance as a rapper. Even though he was in the business, everyone just saw him as a producer, not a rapper. He had to push hard and keep asking for people to give him shot and got lucky one day when somene let him to a verse (I think Jay-Z). Jay-Z is another... no one would give him a deal, so he started selling his own stuff and made his own label (from what I remember hearing).
Breaking into the music business as a top artist as never been easy. It seems like the differnce now is the barriers are down, so it's more about getting people to listen instead of getting an record executive to like your stuff. It's hard to now if the market is any more crowded or if it's just that the consumers have full access now, instead of having to go through the gatekeepers.
I don't remember this. It might've been a bullet point in some fantastical interpretation of potential, but you'd have to be naive to think this was how it would play out. Doesn't take much thinking to see that every free platform gets overrun with hopefuls and spam and the platforms need a way to either rank content or monetise it.
Spotify and co provide distribution, not marketing. If it was as trivial as "create social music platform, get coverage for my music", you and every artist could do it, right?
Not that I don't sympathize with your struggles, but aren't the people who are creating background noise tracks doing exactly that, providing value? The article talks about tracks with natural noise or ambient noises, so it's not exactly the same as turning a fan on. I can't see how this is a scam.
Also from the article, there's a team of five making some of these, so it's not even accurate to label them as low effort (though I'll admit they're probably admin and marketing roles...).
> I have about 30 songs up there, All in all I've probably only gotten about 1,400 streams
That's only 46 listens per song. That suggests to me that you're not self-promoting, or doing something wrong. Even if there weren't white noise tracks on Spotify with 100k listens, there are millions of songs with <100 listens; even if the Spotify exposure algorithms were "fair" you wouldn't get any more listens than you already have.
I'll refrain from salty comments concerning the quality of my work because you're already sold on the ideal that the platform is totally ethical, despite many well selling artists saying the same things I have numerous times.
The platforms exist to promote artists, they do not do that at all.
It's really not for me to defend the merits of my work in response to expressing my experience on the platform... It's really not for you to insult someone you know nothing about, who says they've worked hard. You should really think about that... I have solid success in many other places than Spotify, and that's why I dedicate my time there and not to Spotify.
I listen to a lot of music, mostly noise / ambient / drone and do so mostly during work, so the hours stack up quite rapidly. Per the Spotify model this is quite beneficial for the artist. But I am rather picky in the noise I appreciate so in the end it’s not that many songs I keep. Most I visit once and turn off halfway. So I definitely wouldn’t want to call it easy to create good ambient / noise.
Anyway the other day I saw a YouTube video with 116M views of 9 minutes long that showed hands going into slime. Now compared with a video from say Carfection or PBS EON, that’s quite odd than.
There are people literally recording ceiling fans and then putting it on Spotify, and using low-effort production techniques like play bots to steal royalties from hard working artists. That's what I'm referring to. The only way that Spotify can really fix that is to rely less on algorithms, ban payola, and bring back real curators... But for the sake of their profit, that's not likely to ever happen.
This article is about a platform of hundreds of thousands of artists (or more) and you're using 2-3 artists you loosely observed to say that everything is fair. Thats not a real conversation at all rooted in fact. Far off the topic of making it about me.
I was shocked over the amount of tranquility music we sold. Tranquility was nature sounds. I didn't know about white noise back then, but we probally had it. It was basically music produced cheaply that supposedly relazed people.
I got it. People are stressed. Did listening to calming nature sounds help me--no, but listening to AM radio on a boring station does calm me down, or keeps negative thoughts away.
My sleepy time music was Classic music. Pretty much everything.
Even then becoming a musician was as hard as becomming an artist. There was just no formula besides 1 in a million talent, like Elvis, or just sheer luck, and that meant exposure.
(I am thinking about leaving an old iphone strapped to a tree to record creek sounds tomorrow, and plop it on Spotify under "Songs to calm. Natural, and organic music."), or never leave my house and produce it digitally?)
I never had luck with that to be honest.
I’ve tried all classical playlists including all “Classical for Sleep”. It’s just too emotional with a lot of peaks and crescendos. A lot of treble. Demands a lot of attention to itself.
“Sleepy” jazz on the other hand is often comforting, muted and warm.
The idea of having a setting that makes my phone emit continuous noise until I turn it off is absolutely wild to me.
My guess is the accessibility setting is for people that can't use Siri for whatever reason?
Weird reasons like...not trying to create a voice profile of yourself for corporations?
(Paywalled so difficult to respond to more than the headline.)
I absolutely would listen to that nearly every work day.
Pre-pandemic, I would use 'Forrest Bathing' YT channels mixed in with my favorite music while in the office. The longer the sample of ambient sounds, the better, as I wouldn't have to pause or restart the video. I've kept this up since WFH started.
After months of daily listening, I found that a lot of 'Forrest Bathing' channels would use soundboards, would loop an hour long sample for 10+ hours, would splice in other samples from other places (I could tell from the bird species' calls), etc.
The authentic, 10+ hour long, sampled from a single spot, aurally interesting, no edits, no soundboards, 'Forrest Bathing' videos are very rare [0] and I wish there would be more of them.
The key would be to find aurally interesting areas around you. I've found that the fauna tend to be most active crepuscularly, meaning that the middle of the video can be a bit boring, especially for night videos. Day videos can have animal husbandry to fill in the gaps during mid-day.
Part of the allure of the videos is the 'romance' of the associated visual components. If you can set a video camera up along with the high quality audio, that's just golden. Even though I'm almost never looking at the video, just knowing that I am actually listening to the real sounds of the Yukon, or the Amafi Coast, or a small English hedge, etc, it really makes it for me and makes me feel like that small little box I'm in isn't so bad, that I am actually traveling the world a bit still, that my life is richer and more 'real' in some small way.
[0] I've found a few channels, and even then, the 'good' videos are very few. Yes, I am super picky with this, I can't help it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X-8J485XEM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_WiBGYi-rU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-c1QNq-D7E
It would be the opposite of what you're after, though, as it's completely artificial.
But! It doesn't loop. I can make it of any length, and with some astute randomization it never produces the exact same sequence twice.
Have a microphone at the point of amplification
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/listen-nature-through-...
I was trying to find a picture of these where two of them are butted up against each other & you lie down inbetween them, sort of like a pair of headphones. SEO made it so I couldn’t do that, so this article is the best we get.
Edit: ooh, found close to what I was after.
https://imgur.com/a/BUAexSV
Shit. Somebody on HN with the resources may be able to make decent money with this idea. Remember me if you do :)
BioSphere: https://open.spotify.com/album/28VBLIMroxoxDWx84oegfx Windy&Carl: https://open.spotify.com/track/2Gvy4DbDM6NQ5rUJDljXz4
I did it a few times many years ago when going around the world. Then regret not doing it in a few others on subsequent trips (call to prayer in Morocco, pub noise in Lijiang's bar street, etc).
Do you have examples? I have been decently happy when I have needed to find one, even free ones.
Your link doesn't play and also requests access to my microphone.
Examples: type sleep noise into the android Play store and the top few. Waves, bird noises, rain etc. All useless to me - just want masking noise to block other stuff out.
Granted I'm pretty sure I can get it to play white noise on a different music service but I think it's ridiculous that they would charge for noise.
So your comment seems odd to me. What other economic systems would prevent app makers from extracting as much money as they possibly can?
I’m using my imagination but outside of Star Trek and other sci-fi, I’m drawing a blank.
Are there any present day, earth economic systems that would result in a different outcome?
BTW, Spotify is Swedish and they are closer to socialism than capitalism.
So the comment I replied to would be as accurate it it said “humans” or something instead of capitalist.
I ended up repurposing an old Android tablet hooked up to a cheap USB powered speaker bar through the headphone jack of the tablet. It runs the White Noise app, and I go for sea/waves types of sound. I keep the tablet offline in airplane mode with a very short display-off setting. The sound can loop continuously, or you can set it to switch off after a certain time.
It's been really great every night for the last few years. I did research some sort of sleep machine box on Amazon, but it's surprisingly difficult to find something that doesn't want to shine bright status LEDs into your darkened bedroom, or other annoying things.
https://qrng.anu.edu.au/random-bernoulli-noise/
https://youtu.be/wzjWIxXBs_s
I think of Spotify as an ad company and not a music service or podcast service: https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/06/spotify-introduces-a-new-a...
Apple Music seems to be headed this way as well because trillions just aren't enough: https://www.macworld.com/article/707588/apple-music-ads-stat...
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Other-Podcasts-Partners-etc...
It’s not that I want the free version of Spotify to do something, I would rather use other tools that are free or already paid for.
Separately from this, charging a monthly fee for a white noise app seems like a horrible value and something that everyone should avoid and just use an algorithmic source with a one time fee or is just free. I know that people are free to spend on whatever they like but it seems we’re far into “fool and his money are soon parted” territory.
I can put up with it as there is maybe one or two I listen to regularly with Spotify ads, but if they go much further it's a solid reason to drop the Premium subscription.
If the white noise is in the Music section you will be ad free though.