For more elaborate noise generators (I think it also has a brown noise generator hidden somewhere) you can always go to https://mynoise.net/ - I used to use that site a lot when I was still working from the office, and since my company now also has a "return to office" policy, I guess I will be using it more again in the future...
That site gives off strong "small web" vibes (good thing), and is clearly a product of passion (or at least, a product of competence in the field of sound/signal processing). My donation to get access to the full range of generators was worth every penny.
Linuxbrew is pretty convenient for installing dependencies, especially on "stable" distributions like Debian/Ubuntu. You can install specific versions of dependencies that you want, even keep them side-by-side.
It's also distro-agnostic, so it works almost everywhere.
Looks interesting. It both says that installing without sudo is a feature, which sounds neat, and that installing into ~/.linuxbrew is an unsupported feature.
# On Linux, it installs to /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew if you have sudo access
# and ~/.linuxbrew (which is unsupported) if run interactively.
HOMEBREW_PREFIX_DEFAULT="/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew"
HOMEBREW_CACHE="${HOME}/.cache/Homebrew"
I discovered mynoise.net some years ago. As I lived near a church where the bells would be active every 15 minutes... It really helped to not listen to them.
The downside: the alarm clock was also less audible in the morning! :D
I'm surprised there's any churches left still doing that frequency. Is it a touristy thing or something? Definitely would have thought most at this point are down to hourly or even just once at noon, with an awful lot more silent but for special occasions like weddings.
It seems to be pretty common in Washington, DC. Offhand, I can think of St. John's Episcopal at 16th & H Sts. NW, St. Matthew's [Catholic] Cathedral on the 1700 block of Rhode Island Avenue NW. I think that the First Presbyterian Church at 16th & Kennedy NW does. All this is from just my regular commuting or running routes, so I suspect one can find quite a few more examples.
I used this enough that years ago I paid them money just because I got so much use out of it. Haven't used it in a few years though, as lately I've been listening to more music than noise.
I have this problem that when I know that the such ambient noise is synthesised in any way, then my brain simply rejects it as if I knew it is a placebo so it no longer works.
Similarly if I listed authentic recorded ambient noise, once I recognise a loop point, it becomes extremely annoying.
That's why I can't use tools like mynoise.net.
I had a couple of solid 8 hour recordings from a cafe or office, but after a couple of listens I kind of learned it is a recording and they no longer work. Basically rather than focusing on doing work etc. my brain is listening for faint phrases, whether I heard it before etc.
The workaround I found is that I just have a window open so I can hear street noises, but this is going to be troublesome during the winter.
I am planning to start making recordings so maybe if I have a solid month worth of ambient noise, I will be able to trick myself it is not a repeat if it takes a month for a full rotation.
I can hear Shepard tones [1] in songs now. I remember the first time I heard it in a song, I was blown away, confused as to what I was hearing.
Later when it was pointed out to me that is is "a thing" I started to recognize them in other songs. I sort of miss being naive.
There's a line from one of Feynman's books where he is arguing with an artist friend who dislikes how Feynman (science generally) dissect a rose rather than just admiring its beauty. Feynman is incredulous as to how knowing more about a thing can take away from its beauty. (I may be slightly mis-remembering this exchange.)
That always bothered me because I felt that naïveté is a thing you lose with knowledge and that is not always a good thing.
Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer" [2] instead resonated with me.
Shepard tone is popular for building suspense. The soundtrack for the movie "Dunkirk" leverages a pretty identfiable shepard tone for anyone interested in hearing a quick example.
Your case sounds a bit extreme (perhaps it has an element of nocebo through overthinking it?), but I do share this problem to an extent.
If you like ambient music, I love Brian Eno’s ‘Reflection’ album and use it for a similar purpose as noise. But I eventually got sick of hearing it again and again, recognising the same bits... Then I found he has also released the original endless generator (from which the album is just an hour-long recording) as an iOS app. It’s wonderful. It’s just endless Reflection, never repeating, always sounding new, but always sounding like Reflection. Expensive but worth it, if you liked the hour-long recording.
If street noise worked for me I'd mount a weatherproof microphone outside the window, run a cable from it inside (maybe around the edge of the window) to a preamp driving a cheap Class D power amp, and drive one good speaker with it. Maybe put a graphic EQ in the chain after the preamp if I wanted to fiddle with the sound.
Winter problem solved. No bluetooth or batteries needed; just a wall wart or maybe USB-C.
Running the cable would be the trickiest part if I had close tolerance metal window frames. In that case maybe a bluetooth mic would be best, but I'd have to figure out how to weatherproof it.
It's pretty extreme to insinuate that users are bots with no evidence. I checked both users' accounts and find it incredibly unlikely that either is a bot.
shmerl, the user who mentioned mynoise in that link, has 11,234 karma and has had their account since 2011. rob74, the user you're responding to, has 5,923 karma and has had their account since 2016. Both are recently-active users with a history of real comments that don't mention mynoise.
Perhaps you are seeing this site mentioned frequently because users enjoy it and it fills its niche incredibly well. I previously came across it searching for a Shepherd tone generator and have found that it offers the best balance between tweakability and ease-of-use.
OT, but almost every time I learn of a new feature of iOS these days, it seems to be hidden away in 'accessibility'; most recently the 'double tap' feature (which sadly doesn't work well).
Yea I don't understand why this is so hidden. It also has a really bad UX - you need to go into different submenus and activate different permutations of toggles to get it working...
I've been sleeping with exponentially-smoothed brown noise for years. I use a raspberry pi with its hardware random number generator because with pseudorandom numbers or compressed samples I hear all sorts of artifacts - no doubt at least partially psychological, but psychology matters when you're trying to get to sleep. Uncompressed samples are fine and can be looped without a gap, but that's less fun.
I'm currently looking at building an analogue circuit to generate this noise, because electronics is fun and because sampling thermal noise (which is brown) inside the rPi's hardware rng, having it massaged to white noise and then converting it back to brown noise (with a bit of pseudorandom mixed in as the rate isn't quite high enough) and back to analogue to go to a speaker all seems a bit daft.
which gives four different circuits, they each have their own sound.
yes, they are pink, not brown, but pipe the output through a spare opamp configured as a low-pass filter and you can have "any color you like".
Then pipe that through a low-pass gate and you start to get some interesting bloops, and before you know it you are full-time building Eurorack modules.
The code is a horrifyingly awful bit of C++ and the whole thing is horrendously inefficient (rpi heating the room up doing arithmetic). I wouldn't want to publish it in its current form, and the next thing will be an analogue circuit. I might blog about that, though.
Interested to know more about your experience with uncompressed audio generated from pseudorandom numbers. Do you know what PRNG you were using? I would think the simplest common ones would indeed be terrible but it could be very interesting to study if something like the Mersenne Twister or better could be detected as "not truly random" in this way.
> I've been sleeping with exponentially-smoothed brown noise for years. I use a raspberry pi with its hardware random number generator because with pseudorandom numbers or compressed samples I hear all sorts of artifacts - no doubt at least partially psychological, but psychology matters when you're trying to get to sleep. Uncompressed samples are fine and can be looped without a gap, but that's less fun.
Well, there have certainly been a plenty of bad RNGs in use.
> because sampling thermal noise (which is brown)
It's not. You need a filter to get pink/brown noise out of it
Any cryptographic pseudorandom number generator (or hash function, equivalently) should be completely indistinguishable from random noise. Although, frankly I don’t think you should need to go that far. Almost any PRNG should do it, it’s really only the simplest ones that have noticeable periodicity.
There’s a related trend of listening to key brain wave frequencies, with the claim it can push the brain into more focused states. And there is a small bit of evidence it might work.
I doubt it. Like noise, it might reduce sensitivity to stimuli, though, which can reduce distraction and thus make it easier to focus your attention as a side effect.
Haven't played with them for a couple of years but can remember my "sweet spot" was when it sounded like the sound is coming from the center of my brain, not from from a left or right ear, not from the environment. It's a weird physical feeling, almost the same feeling I get from a small dose of psilocybin. Head feels slightly heavier too, esp near the backside. Eventually I stopped playing with binaural beats because I felt it does affect my brain in some way but I didn't know if it was good or bad, but my instinct at the time told me to stop.
While I can't say I've done serious research, I have hacked around with synthesizing different noise types using a synth, and there is a concept called "entrainment," which I understood as getting your brain to focus on reconciling and cohering related sound or light stimuli. There are triggers for it, where there are just enough sensory cribs to imply coherence that you think you can interpret it, but of course since it's random, you can't, and that state of expectation absorbs your attention, distracting it from obsessive thoughts.
For some people, listening to Bach is like hearing another conversation where it becomes hard to form responses to someone actually trying to talk to them over the music. That's probably true for any music they like, but there may be a level of complexity that "entrains" the mind by submitting its buffering and cohering mechanisms to rhythmic boundaries that prevent it from focusing on other stimuli.
The woo around "binaural beats," is related, where by playing a different tone in each ear that is only offset by a few Hz, the ability of our brain to tell the difference between them (or not) oscillates and we apparently "hear" low frequency beats and harmonics as artifacts of this clipping or that do not appear on a spectrograph. The relationship of the frequency of this clipping or beats is has a sort of backfit horoscopyness about how different frequencies "activate" different cognitive abilities. However, it's surprisingly less bullshitty than it sounds. Since the frequency of the beats resembles natural electrical impulse rhythms in the brain during sleep, (owing to the beats being literal artifacts of gaps in the brain's processing and not of the sounds themselves) there has been some very interesting art and research into what messing with what are essentially just signal processing limits might mean.
Max Richter's "Sleep" concert was designed using similar principles, but instead of synthesized tones, the sounds are composed and performed live in music over 8.5 hours. (https://www.maxrichtermusic.com/albums/sleep/) Once it clicks that you can create these massive washing harmonic effects that overwhelm the senses with classical instruments and live musicians, the cult of Wagner starts to make sense. (e.g. the Das Rheingold Prelude).
People use white noise generator programs to put babies to sleep, and I think there is a lot of interesting art to be made using the entrainment concept that runs through brownian and 1/f noise, to wall of sound music.
>Rain On A Tent • If you have trouble falling asleep, try spending a night under a tarp tent listening to the sound of the rain.
As someone who spent a lot of time camping while growing up, I could not think of a worse sound for trying to fall asleep... namely the large drops that come off trees at just a slow enough "rhythm" to be torturous.
The whole point of tents is to protect you from the elements. Sounds like you had a poor quality tent, or it was set up in a low spot that pools water.
As someone who has also spent a lot of time camping, rain hitting the tent of a roof, a metal roof, or even a tarp over a hammock is hypnotic and I love sleeping to it.
It’s one of my favorite sounds and puts me in an amazing headspace.
Maybe there were circumstances which led to us each experiencing the same type of soundscape completely different?
I used to live in a canal boat, 3mm steel roof. The sound of rain on that, so long as you had a fire going, was very cozy and enjoyable. But I think on a psychological level a large part of the comfort is the relief of being sheltered.
It depends on the rain for me. A nice steady rain with small, well-dispersed droplets makes a wonderful sound.
Giant droplets accumulated on branches, falling off of a tree onto the roof of your truck, falling at random intervals, something like 5-30 seconds apart. Sounds more like someone tapping on the roof. That will keep you up all night.
>A nice steady rain with small, well-dispersed droplets makes a wonderful sound.
This is relaxing.
>Giant droplets accumulated on branches, falling off of a tree onto the roof of your truck, falling at random intervals, something like 5-30 seconds apart. Sounds more like someone tapping on the roof. That will keep you up all night.
Considering that bird noises are most associated with morning, the sun rising, and when you should becoming awake and alert, having bird sounds in tracks meant to be "relaxing" has always seemed backwards to me.
From TFA: “ There isn’t likely to be any danger in listening to BROWN NOISE for, say, eight hours at a time, Dr. Berlau said, unless someone plays the sound at unsafe volumes (listening to noise above 70 decibels over a long period of time can damage your hearing).”
The only consequence I can think of is that you might find it harder to go to sleep without them for a while. That was my experience with always using a mechanical background noise generator throughout my childhood, and then not.
It's like a fan in an enclosure with adjustable vents. It's louder than a fan of equivalent size. They've mostly been replaced by electronic background noise generators these days.
I think this what's behind the appeal of Shoegaze music and why some people get it and others don't. There's something very comforting to me about the fuzzy evolving sounds you hear in Shoegaze music. As someone with a loud anxious mind who's also prone to auditory sensory overload I find certain sounds such as those found in Shoegaze music shuts this all off.
If I'm out in public and I'm feeling anxious there's really nothing that makes me feel at ease quicker. My mind kind of melts away with the music. I guess it sounds like how putting a blanket over my brain might feel.
If listening to "Loveless" from My Bloody Valentine, make sure your volume is low, especially if wearing headphones, you've been warned. My ears will never be the same again, thanks. Wow.
The loudest show I've ever been to (and I've been to metal, noise, and other kinds of loud-oriented shows) was MBV, where you could actually feel the sound almost like a wave against your whole body. So I think Kevin Shields would disagree with this advice. :D
Put some good earphones on, turn it up, and just let your mind shut off as the fuzz and noise slowly builds. The part around ~3.45 is almost orgasmic to my ear, but I'm on the spectrum and I'm quite sensitive to audible sounds so perhaps others don't hear it quite like I do.
I would add Mazzy Star, and a lot of Jangle pop to the list too. Thurston Moore's album The Best Day is another great recent addition to the jangle pop genre.
Not sure if I'm on the spectrum or not, but that was good, thank you for sharing it.
Seems like that particular YouTube link is unavailable (maybe just in the UK?), but I believe this is another copy of the same track, The Radio Dept. - The City Limit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNOjIJN5u7E
A general starting place will be My Bloody Valentine's album Loveless which is usually agreed to be the album that kickstarted the genre.
There are a lot of different directions you could go from there, but personally, one of my favorite releases is Guilty of Everything by Nothing as a more modern take on shoegaze. (mid 2010's vs 90's)
Additionally, there are some critically acclaimed releases in extensions of the genre like post-metal with Deafheaven's album Sunbather being a great entry into that particular sub-genre.
Hope that gives you a bit of a starting off point!
Talk Talk (Laughing Stock and Spirit of Eden, post-synthwave)
This all falls under dream pop and while I don't think it has much in common with noise's effect on the brain, it can be a little disorienting due to the depth and variance in sound.
There are some great recommendations here for classic 90s shoegaze. I recently found a more current band that is playing some great shoegaze: Deserta. Love these guys!
That Mazzy Star performance ... in Silicon Valley, ha ha. Playing a floppy-disk-throw from Google HQ — well, were Google there in 1994 (I guess that would be Silicon Graphics or some such).
My first intro was The Jesus And Mary Chain's Psychocandy. The mix on "Taste the Floor"[1] is so crazy—the guitar is so loud it begs you to turn up the volume to "hurt your ears" levels (phone/laptop speakers will not do this justice). I swear I've lost hearing due to my love of shoegaze…
A more recent version of this kind of noise rock is The Raveonettes [2].
While not Shoegaze, the first time I realized my inner dialogue had stopped completely for a few seconds was after the first time I listened to Washing Machine (the song, not the album, though I was listening to the album in full) by Sonic Youth. Up until then I had never though that'd be possible: I always assumed we all had an inner dialogue going on all the time (I later learned some people don't have this at all, which I find intriguing, probably as intriguing as they find that some people always have one!).
I have an inner dialogue, or at least I think I do. When I picked up meditation, I think I learned how to have it stop. Or at least so I don't notice it is occurring. It feels like instead of some of my brain resources being devoted to thinking or analyzing all my focus is shifted on the state of me, skin temperature, wind feel, sounds.
Interesting, I was picking up meditation too around the time I had this experience, though I was not (intentionally) meditating while listening to the record.
To this day, I don't know how to stop the dialog reliably, but I know some activities and some music that help me do that (Metal Machine Music from Lou Reed works great for me, for example).
I'm more into post-rock (gy!be <3) but I totally relate to your feeling. This massive/overload wall of sound blanketing your brain.
Even if there's nearly no lyrics in post-rock, it is strictly impossible for me to work while listening to it.
And shoegaze/postrock are something you have to enjoy with headphones. The work on stereo is always phenomenal.
(I wonder if some bands used binaural beats to go further this way. kinda reminds me I-doser ;) )
> As someone with a loud anxious mind who's also prone to auditory sensory overload I find certain sounds such as those found in Shoegaze music shuts this all off.
This is one of the main reasons for my love of extreme metal and other abrasive, noisy or drone genres. There are even shoegaze black metal bands (blackgaze) such as Andavald. The cacophony of the music drowns out the mental noise and I can focus on what I'm doing. Happy, up beat stuff, or clear vocals, seal focus and becomes an annoying distraction. Though classical music or certain instrumental music is soothing to me as well.
I remember reading that von Neumann was a fan of turning on the TV or radio to very loud volumes when he was working at home. Likely to achieve the same effect.
> I remember reading that von Neumann was a fan of turning on the TV or radio to very loud volumes when he was working at home. Likely to achieve the same effect.
There is a whole genre of YouTube videos that is just somebody walking in the rain in a cityscape for 3+ hours. I put the video on on my TV, to get both a sense of calm and also a sense of exploration/movement. Something about the coffee shop ambience videos just no longer tickles my mind. It’s best to pair with reeally slow, long music, such as Subaeris - The City in Rain (56 minute long ambient “dreampunk” song). There’s typically a moment in this process that I feel my mind de-tense.. allowing the real work to begin
Putting aside the troll vocals and terrible underlying philosophies, some Black Metal has similarly lovely guitar soundwashes as well. It's an interesting paradox.
fascinating, I like all those artists but would've never tried sleeping to Metallica or Yngwie. I take it the fast tempos and high-energy don't keep you up?
I think there's some mechanical nature to the rhythms, and the chords tend to be complex enough that something is going on that keeps my subconscious occupied and makes it easier to lose awareness (and fall asleep).
Or maybe it's me. I fell asleep for a minute or two in a stadium while Rush was playing Time Stand Still as a college student (so age wasn't a factor ;) ).
wow! I think falling asleep during a Rush concert might be some new kind of cardinal sin - even if it's a relatively more mellow song :P
curious if more progressive metal works the same for you? (e.g. Dream Theater) rhythms are less regular, although kinda mathematical in some sense so I could see it still applying
For productivity I've also tried binaural sound, and found it can help me focus (or at least make me imagine it helps me focus, which is close enough for me).
There's a great website that allows you to customize quite a few parameters and also adjust the 'wave' frequency for different scenarios (from 'sleep' to 'focus'), it's interesting to play around with if you have headphones: https://brainaural.com/
I know this isn't very professional but Trey Parker and Matt Stone co-opted the term Brown Noise back in 2000 in the South Park episode "World Wide Recorder Concert". Maybe Brownian Noise would be a better and more accurate description?
Parker and Stone were just making fun of it and did not coin the term Brown Note.
The term is from the 1970s military research.
As with many South Park episodes, the topic they are making fun of is usually based on exaggerated facts. It's what makes their show still funny even after several decades.
As a complement to the adjacent comment thread on Shoegaze music, I find a similarly dense, soothing, blanketing effect from some recent noise/drone music genres (especially on good headphones, or out loud with a subwoofer), for example:
The pulsing deep noise of Tim Hecker's Piano Drop:
For those wanting to generate some sounds like the above, I made what is effectively a noisy synthesizer / visual demo a while back that can be played note by note on a PC keyboard (or will play itself if left untouched, see attached readme). But to get it into "wall of sound" territory you need to hold down the up arrow and/or space bar for quite a while to speed up the bike until the visuals start distorting:
Everything by Carbon Based Lifeforms is also very soothing, albums like Interloper, World of Sleepers, Hydroponic garden also really give me that feeling and with just a bit more beat and melody that I love.
The first track of Interloper just soothes me real quickly:
I was legitimately looking to have major renovation done on my condo (triple glazed windows, sound insulation added elsewhere, etc) before I got a white noise machine. Before, I'd be woken up at 730am (following a 2am prod deployment) by some jackass cranking a leaf blower the very second the noise ordinance allowed. Now I usually sleep peacefully to my alarm. I don't really care whether there's scientific evidence of it working, it's saved my sanity.
Two things to look out for:
1. Make sure it's a non-looping white noise machine. The looping ones drive me crazy
2. Mine can play lower frequencies which really help block out external noise.
Agreed on the looping. I had a cheap white noise machine in the 90s, and once my brain identified the loop, I was locked into it and couldn't fall asleep.
Drowning out inconsistent noise with generally predictive noise seems pretty intuitive to me, and I think the article touches on this simple explanation.
Nothing special or magical is happening in our brains, just not hearing interruptive sounds helps us not get distracted or awakened.
10000% effective for me in order to sleep. I live in a loud neighborhood with very rude neighbors who play loud bass. Brown noise (albeit cranked very loudly via a Lectrofan brand machine) keeps low frequency nuisance at bay. It can't block out the physical aspects of loud upstairs neighbors stomping or loud cars rumbling past, but it has really saved my sanity and blocked 90% of the noise.
White noise on the other hand doesn't really do it as much for me, but is helpful for blocking out people talking, higher frequency sounds, etc.
These don’t go into the ear as far so aren’t painful. I feel the reduction in noise isn’t as good, but the frequency response is much more even. I wear these under noise cancelling headphones to watch TV and listen to music in total isolation. You do lose a bit of fidelity but it’s still very liveable.
Also, I get about 6 months to a year out of each pair which is less wasteful than foam earplugs.
There's also some great reusable earplugs which are much better for the environment than foam earplugs. Plus, it saves money long term vs buying a bunch of foam earplugs
Both brown noise and shoegaze remind me a lot of the Safe and Sound Protocol by Porges. It's a therapeutic intervention designed to increase cues of safety by filtering common music into the range of human speech. The creator of the protocol has done some research demonstrating efficacy and come up with a plausible theory for why his protocol works[1]. Maybe his work could add color as to why shoegaze and brown noise is so impactful for some people? Not really sure, but seems related.
I've used SSP and let's just say I think it's nothing short of revolutionary. It seems to be completely changing how my brain works and how quickly it gets activated (in the sense of what state it is in).
I slept with the new Airpods Pro with noise cancellation on. I am trying to escape road noises. E.g., random car noises, sirens, tyres screeching, etc. Noise cancellation on these are crazy good. However, it was actually worse to find peace. I keep trying to guess if I am still hearing noises when it was actually fully quiet. It was a bad night.
Yesterday night, I just make the A/C runs its fans all night. Which I guess is very similar to brown noise. Found peace immediately. And I was able to ignore almost road noises during the full night (despite being the same as the previous night). It was a surprising restful night.
Unclear if airpod pros use bluetooth at all if they are not playing any audio just doing noise cancelling. I suspect they don’t, and just ping the phone at intervals to stay connected.
But either way, the health impact of a bad night’s sleep is going to be so so so much worse than whatever small or nonexistent effect bluetooth has
> Yesterday night, I just make the A/C runs its fans all night.
If you run it every night, and if you're doing it just for the noise, understand that your next month's electricity bill is going to be quite... shocking.
We used to run box fans at night in our bedroom when we lived in apartments to drown out the sounds of neighbors and traffic noise. We continued the tradition when we bought our first house. One day I decided to get some real data on what our energy spending was and plugged a box fan into a kill-a-watt. I don't remember the exact number but it was high enough that the very next day I bought a "white noise machine" for every bedroom in the house and our monthly electricity bill dropped IN HALF. Basically paid for themselves in the first week.
The best white noise machines are made by "LectroFan". These used to cost $15 on Amazon, now they are $50. Whichever brand you buy, the most important thing is to get one with a good-size speaker so that it can reproduce lower frequencies decently.
> If you run it every night, and if you're doing it just for the noise, understand that your next month's electricity bill is going to be quite... shocking.
If it's just the fans, shouldn't be pretty economical? I thought also circulating the air was a net positive anyway.
I got used to running the fan over summer and loved the comfort it provided. I usually wear earplugs to sleep and it was nice to have something just constantly blocking out traffic and neighbour noise without any effort. Now it's getting colder I was looking at buying a LectroFan to do the same thing. Based on your comments even at $50 they seem worth it, so thanks for the recommendation!
you can soundproof your sleeping room, just need to dampen frequencies that offer direction cues, they are above 1khz. electronics, car sound whooshing, rattling all produce those frequencies. if it's hard to dampen enough - dampen as much as you find economically viable and raise noise floor by running ventilation or big diameter fan, it will mask the rest of them.
also having fresh air ventilation (with soundproofed intake - they use quiet fan) is much more comfortable than having windows opened on busy street.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 320 ms ] threadThat site gives off strong "small web" vibes (good thing), and is clearly a product of passion (or at least, a product of competence in the field of sound/signal processing). My donation to get access to the full range of generators was worth every penny.
alias brownnoise='play -n synth brownnoise synth pinknoise mix synth sine amod 0.3 10'
It sounds like waves gently coming ashore.
I'm sure I collected it somewhere here on HN, because I don't know anything about how the command works.
Edit: I have these, too, and I like them all:
alias whitenoise='play -q -c 2 -n synth brownnoise band -n 1600 1500 tremolo .1 30'
alias pinknoise='play -t sl -r48000 -c2 -n synth -1 pinknoise .1 80'
Play is a standard package from your package manager
Thanks!
brew is a really nice package installer that works with both MacOS and Linux.
So brew, any "killer apps" on brew for linux? What's nice to get from there?
It's also distro-agnostic, so it works almost everywhere.
I think it must be installed by default in my distro.
The downside: the alarm clock was also less audible in the morning! :D
Similarly if I listed authentic recorded ambient noise, once I recognise a loop point, it becomes extremely annoying.
That's why I can't use tools like mynoise.net.
I had a couple of solid 8 hour recordings from a cafe or office, but after a couple of listens I kind of learned it is a recording and they no longer work. Basically rather than focusing on doing work etc. my brain is listening for faint phrases, whether I heard it before etc.
The workaround I found is that I just have a window open so I can hear street noises, but this is going to be troublesome during the winter.
I am planning to start making recordings so maybe if I have a solid month worth of ambient noise, I will be able to trick myself it is not a repeat if it takes a month for a full rotation.
Later when it was pointed out to me that is is "a thing" I started to recognize them in other songs. I sort of miss being naive.
There's a line from one of Feynman's books where he is arguing with an artist friend who dislikes how Feynman (science generally) dissect a rose rather than just admiring its beauty. Feynman is incredulous as to how knowing more about a thing can take away from its beauty. (I may be slightly mis-remembering this exchange.)
That always bothered me because I felt that naïveté is a thing you lose with knowledge and that is not always a good thing.
Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer" [2] instead resonated with me.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone
[2] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45479/when-i-heard-th...
You can direct your attention at one or the other. Maybe both to a degree but concentrated deep focus demands exclusivity.
https://youtu.be/2na0hW0JGJ0
There's an Elliot Smith song with it as well ... I'll have to try to recall it.
If you like ambient music, I love Brian Eno’s ‘Reflection’ album and use it for a similar purpose as noise. But I eventually got sick of hearing it again and again, recognising the same bits... Then I found he has also released the original endless generator (from which the album is just an hour-long recording) as an iOS app. It’s wonderful. It’s just endless Reflection, never repeating, always sounding new, but always sounding like Reflection. Expensive but worth it, if you liked the hour-long recording.
I've considered 3D printing custom shells for it to further tune the sound profile to achieve the brown noise ideal.
Winter problem solved. No bluetooth or batteries needed; just a wall wart or maybe USB-C.
Running the cable would be the trickiest part if I had close tolerance metal window frames. In that case maybe a bluetooth mic would be best, but I'd have to figure out how to weatherproof it.
shmerl, the user who mentioned mynoise in that link, has 11,234 karma and has had their account since 2011. rob74, the user you're responding to, has 5,923 karma and has had their account since 2016. Both are recently-active users with a history of real comments that don't mention mynoise.
Perhaps you are seeing this site mentioned frequently because users enjoy it and it fills its niche incredibly well. I previously came across it searching for a Shepherd tone generator and have found that it offers the best balance between tweakability and ease-of-use.
For anyone who visits, consider donating!
It has many options, most of them worse than nothing.
The only good one is airplane, which sounds exactly like brown noise.
“Dark Noise” sounds a lot like brown noise to me. Super useful.
There are some other interesting features behind this icon in Control Center as well: Live Listen, and noise levels for headphones, to name a few.
I'm currently looking at building an analogue circuit to generate this noise, because electronics is fun and because sampling thermal noise (which is brown) inside the rPi's hardware rng, having it massaged to white noise and then converting it back to brown noise (with a bit of pseudorandom mixed in as the rate isn't quite high enough) and back to analogue to go to a speaker all seems a bit daft.
which gives four different circuits, they each have their own sound.
yes, they are pink, not brown, but pipe the output through a spare opamp configured as a low-pass filter and you can have "any color you like".
Then pipe that through a low-pass gate and you start to get some interesting bloops, and before you know it you are full-time building Eurorack modules.
Well, there have certainly been a plenty of bad RNGs in use.
> because sampling thermal noise (which is brown)
It's not. You need a filter to get pink/brown noise out of it
For some people, listening to Bach is like hearing another conversation where it becomes hard to form responses to someone actually trying to talk to them over the music. That's probably true for any music they like, but there may be a level of complexity that "entrains" the mind by submitting its buffering and cohering mechanisms to rhythmic boundaries that prevent it from focusing on other stimuli.
The woo around "binaural beats," is related, where by playing a different tone in each ear that is only offset by a few Hz, the ability of our brain to tell the difference between them (or not) oscillates and we apparently "hear" low frequency beats and harmonics as artifacts of this clipping or that do not appear on a spectrograph. The relationship of the frequency of this clipping or beats is has a sort of backfit horoscopyness about how different frequencies "activate" different cognitive abilities. However, it's surprisingly less bullshitty than it sounds. Since the frequency of the beats resembles natural electrical impulse rhythms in the brain during sleep, (owing to the beats being literal artifacts of gaps in the brain's processing and not of the sounds themselves) there has been some very interesting art and research into what messing with what are essentially just signal processing limits might mean.
Max Richter's "Sleep" concert was designed using similar principles, but instead of synthesized tones, the sounds are composed and performed live in music over 8.5 hours. (https://www.maxrichtermusic.com/albums/sleep/) Once it clicks that you can create these massive washing harmonic effects that overwhelm the senses with classical instruments and live musicians, the cult of Wagner starts to make sense. (e.g. the Das Rheingold Prelude).
People use white noise generator programs to put babies to sleep, and I think there is a lot of interesting art to be made using the entrainment concept that runs through brownian and 1/f noise, to wall of sound music.
As someone who spent a lot of time camping while growing up, I could not think of a worse sound for trying to fall asleep... namely the large drops that come off trees at just a slow enough "rhythm" to be torturous.
It’s one of my favorite sounds and puts me in an amazing headspace.
Maybe there were circumstances which led to us each experiencing the same type of soundscape completely different?
Giant droplets accumulated on branches, falling off of a tree onto the roof of your truck, falling at random intervals, something like 5-30 seconds apart. Sounds more like someone tapping on the roof. That will keep you up all night.
This is relaxing.
>Giant droplets accumulated on branches, falling off of a tree onto the roof of your truck, falling at random intervals, something like 5-30 seconds apart. Sounds more like someone tapping on the roof. That will keep you up all night.
This is what I cannot stand.
What is this? A fan?
If I'm out in public and I'm feeling anxious there's really nothing that makes me feel at ease quicker. My mind kind of melts away with the music. I guess it sounds like how putting a blanket over my brain might feel.
The three classic albums of the genre
Loveless - My Bloody Valentine
Souvlaki - Slowdive
Nowhere - Ride
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9wnpiiMUJs
https://youtu.be/eH5mqLjwg6U
Paul’s Boutique represent.
If you're asking for my recommendations though, when I'm anxious this song is probably my favourite, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ4Mn2X-Wm4
Put some good earphones on, turn it up, and just let your mind shut off as the fuzz and noise slowly builds. The part around ~3.45 is almost orgasmic to my ear, but I'm on the spectrum and I'm quite sensitive to audible sounds so perhaps others don't hear it quite like I do.
The combination of the music and the jellyfish floating by in that video.
Seems like that particular YouTube link is unavailable (maybe just in the UK?), but I believe this is another copy of the same track, The Radio Dept. - The City Limit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNOjIJN5u7E
There are a lot of different directions you could go from there, but personally, one of my favorite releases is Guilty of Everything by Nothing as a more modern take on shoegaze. (mid 2010's vs 90's)
Additionally, there are some critically acclaimed releases in extensions of the genre like post-metal with Deafheaven's album Sunbather being a great entry into that particular sub-genre.
Hope that gives you a bit of a starting off point!
Is a top choice and rare enough - you can find it on spotify now though !
Cocteau Twins
Talk Talk (Laughing Stock and Spirit of Eden, post-synthwave)
This all falls under dream pop and while I don't think it has much in common with noise's effect on the brain, it can be a little disorienting due to the depth and variance in sound.
(Though it's just an algorithm and sometimes can have opinions on what constitutes a genre that active listeners of the genre might disagree with.)
[1]: https://everynoise.com/engenremap-shoegaze.html
The live version serves well to show you why it's called Shoegaze :)
My Bloody Valentine - Only Shallow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyYMzEplnfU
Quintessential shoegaze song
Ringo Deathstarr - Sweet Girl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0Mgv2mn-Lg
One of my personal favorites
A more recent version of this kind of noise rock is The Raveonettes [2].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCtPz-guwO8
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa7JfWsMxgs
https://www.last.fm/tag/shoegaze
https://www.last.fm/tag/drone
While not Shoegaze, the first time I realized my inner dialogue had stopped completely for a few seconds was after the first time I listened to Washing Machine (the song, not the album, though I was listening to the album in full) by Sonic Youth. Up until then I had never though that'd be possible: I always assumed we all had an inner dialogue going on all the time (I later learned some people don't have this at all, which I find intriguing, probably as intriguing as they find that some people always have one!).
To this day, I don't know how to stop the dialog reliably, but I know some activities and some music that help me do that (Metal Machine Music from Lou Reed works great for me, for example).
I'm more into post-rock (gy!be <3) but I totally relate to your feeling. This massive/overload wall of sound blanketing your brain.
Even if there's nearly no lyrics in post-rock, it is strictly impossible for me to work while listening to it.
And shoegaze/postrock are something you have to enjoy with headphones. The work on stereo is always phenomenal. (I wonder if some bands used binaural beats to go further this way. kinda reminds me I-doser ;) )
This is one of the main reasons for my love of extreme metal and other abrasive, noisy or drone genres. There are even shoegaze black metal bands (blackgaze) such as Andavald. The cacophony of the music drowns out the mental noise and I can focus on what I'm doing. Happy, up beat stuff, or clear vocals, seal focus and becomes an annoying distraction. Though classical music or certain instrumental music is soothing to me as well.
I remember reading that von Neumann was a fan of turning on the TV or radio to very loud volumes when he was working at home. Likely to achieve the same effect.
There is a whole genre of YouTube videos that is just somebody walking in the rain in a cityscape for 3+ hours. I put the video on on my TV, to get both a sense of calm and also a sense of exploration/movement. Something about the coffee shop ambience videos just no longer tickles my mind. It’s best to pair with reeally slow, long music, such as Subaeris - The City in Rain (56 minute long ambient “dreampunk” song). There’s typically a moment in this process that I feel my mind de-tense.. allowing the real work to begin
Later, djent style metal did the trick (preferably with the least amount of "troll" vocals). - such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyBrxxUWO28
Or maybe it's me. I fell asleep for a minute or two in a stadium while Rush was playing Time Stand Still as a college student (so age wasn't a factor ;) ).
curious if more progressive metal works the same for you? (e.g. Dream Theater) rhythms are less regular, although kinda mathematical in some sense so I could see it still applying
There's a great website that allows you to customize quite a few parameters and also adjust the 'wave' frequency for different scenarios (from 'sleep' to 'focus'), it's interesting to play around with if you have headphones: https://brainaural.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_note
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_noise
https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/The_Brown_Note
The term is from the 1970s military research.
As with many South Park episodes, the topic they are making fun of is usually based on exaggerated facts. It's what makes their show still funny even after several decades.
The pulsing deep noise of Tim Hecker's Piano Drop:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlfwZDR_1Hg
The gradual crescendo to a wall of noise in Abul Mogard's Like Water:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4taaOwvzDMY
Conflicting tension + blanket of sound in Siavash Amini's The Wind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9Fut9yEYgQ
NB: All of the above have a significant low frequency component that may be missed on desktop speakers or low quality headphones...
https://acatalept.itch.io/eternalapex
The first track of Interloper just soothes me real quickly:
https://youtu.be/-9pgIVcB3rk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m2Lr_HqCfg
I find it very relaxing. I like how the beat seems to subtly change in different parts of the song - it could be an auditory illusion.
White noise static?
Blinkenlights field?
This? https://vimeo.com/313049496
Smell? Tactile? Thought?
Two things to look out for: 1. Make sure it's a non-looping white noise machine. The looping ones drive me crazy 2. Mine can play lower frequencies which really help block out external noise.
But it's not as bad as hearing somebody in your white noise: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/mehrar
Nothing special or magical is happening in our brains, just not hearing interruptive sounds helps us not get distracted or awakened.
White noise on the other hand doesn't really do it as much for me, but is helpful for blocking out people talking, higher frequency sounds, etc.
https://www.3m.co.uk/3M/en_GB/p/d/b00017649/
I always keep a few spare packets in my bag. On a few occasions (usually conferences) people have been grateful for them.
You can usually get a box of 200 pairs for ~£20 on Amazon.
After a bit of research I found these https://www.happyearsearplugs.com/
These don’t go into the ear as far so aren’t painful. I feel the reduction in noise isn’t as good, but the frequency response is much more even. I wear these under noise cancelling headphones to watch TV and listen to music in total isolation. You do lose a bit of fidelity but it’s still very liveable.
Also, I get about 6 months to a year out of each pair which is less wasteful than foam earplugs.
I've never tried the 3M 1100s, though.
https://us.loopearplugs.com/products/quiet
https://www.flareaudio.com/products/sleeep-pro
https://www.happyearsearplugs.com/ (which someone already mentioned on here)
[1] https://www.emdrwestonsupermare.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/201...
Then, I noticed it said "noise."
In all seriousness, I like to listen to "ambient techno," which can often be much like brown noise, during my morning walks.
I slept with the new Airpods Pro with noise cancellation on. I am trying to escape road noises. E.g., random car noises, sirens, tyres screeching, etc. Noise cancellation on these are crazy good. However, it was actually worse to find peace. I keep trying to guess if I am still hearing noises when it was actually fully quiet. It was a bad night.
Yesterday night, I just make the A/C runs its fans all night. Which I guess is very similar to brown noise. Found peace immediately. And I was able to ignore almost road noises during the full night (despite being the same as the previous night). It was a surprising restful night.
But either way, the health impact of a bad night’s sleep is going to be so so so much worse than whatever small or nonexistent effect bluetooth has
> It was a surprising restful night.
Is not a night of bad sleep often followed by a night of good sleep?
For me, usually bad nights are more common than good nights.
If you run it every night, and if you're doing it just for the noise, understand that your next month's electricity bill is going to be quite... shocking.
We used to run box fans at night in our bedroom when we lived in apartments to drown out the sounds of neighbors and traffic noise. We continued the tradition when we bought our first house. One day I decided to get some real data on what our energy spending was and plugged a box fan into a kill-a-watt. I don't remember the exact number but it was high enough that the very next day I bought a "white noise machine" for every bedroom in the house and our monthly electricity bill dropped IN HALF. Basically paid for themselves in the first week.
The best white noise machines are made by "LectroFan". These used to cost $15 on Amazon, now they are $50. Whichever brand you buy, the most important thing is to get one with a good-size speaker so that it can reproduce lower frequencies decently.
If it's just the fans, shouldn't be pretty economical? I thought also circulating the air was a net positive anyway.
also having fresh air ventilation (with soundproofed intake - they use quiet fan) is much more comfortable than having windows opened on busy street.