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Not too weird, but I found this accidentally: a subwoofer under my bed (the speakers that came with it broke)
I found a ten hour long brown noise mp3 that is set to loop indefinitely on an old burner phone. Through the subwoofer it sounds exactly like the warp engines from Star Trek TNG. Incredibly comforting, and hard to sleep without
There are actually videos of warp engine noise.
Have you found a way to loop that MP3 with crossfade? My current problem is there’s a small noticeable gap of silence between repeated tracks.
Ok that’s actually really rad. I’m gonna have to fuck around a bit and see if I can do smth similar.
I gave myself tinnitus
It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Is that bit the reason people listen to white noise? Seems counter intuitive
Tinnitus is a constant whine. Other actual noise helps prevent having to constantly be thinking and feeling the whine because the "white noise" has your ear dealing with other things.
It isn't the reason everyone listens to white noise but people with Tinnitus could help themselves go less crazy if they listen to white noise.
It was a joke.
BTW - For anyone with F-Droid, I highly (highly) highly recommend Noice
It has:
Back in University I used it to sleep right through a massive party my roommates threw when I had a midterm the next day. 10/10 app
Brown noise
Ain’t that the one that makes you shit yaself?
You're thinking of the brown NOTE, which has not been proven to actually exist.
It goes something like this:
White noise is a mixture of all frequencies audible to humans, which sounds quite high pitched. It's excellent for focus, against tinnitus and just for it not to be too quiet. Helps a lot of people sleep too.
Pink noise is the same thing except tweaked to sound lower yet still "crisp". It's been shown to generally be even more effective for falling asleep than white noise.
Brown noise is the same deal yet deeper still. It's been shown to be effective against anxiety and, at least in my own anecdotal experience, against anxiety-induced insomnia.
On top of all these benefits, a combination of all three is what headphones and earbuds use for active noise canceling, an effect you can also achieve to some degree yourself.
It's a lower frequency noise, some people enjoy it more. As a bad analogy, it's a bit more like hearing a "waterfall" (brown noise) than "wind" (white noise)
I for one prefer brown noise. Could be a result of me working on a ship for a long while. I always found the deep engine hum with the sea against my porthole to be very soothing. Plus, the rocking motion didn't exactly hurt either.
Not quite, that's the mythical 'brown note'.
Just installed. This is sweet as hell.
I was kind of surprised that Office was one of the noises you could play. I would probably have work nightmares falling asleep to that.
That’s just noise. White noise is a specific kind of noise.
My weird way of using white noise is I have a set of scripts to precisely control my volume. I turn on a video of white noise on youtube, then I run my script to slowly, steadily raise the volume up to whatever level I want.
The entire point of the script is to avoid a clear moment when the noise starts or stops. To further hide the transition from consciousness, I have delay built in, and I recently added randomized delay between volume increments.
I run the script, and an hour later brown noise is blasting in my room, but I never have to be conscious of it.
So "background ambience" would be a better term to describe the city council meetings?
LiveATC streams. If you are not listening it's a constant stream of radio-garbled jargon. Just pick a busy airport.
I watch my city council meetings attentively. Local politics has an enormous impact on your day-to-day life and it’s also an area where being informed and engaged is most easily able to actually effect the outcome you want. City councillors are more likely to have their view swayed by a modest letter-writing campaign than your Member of Parliament/Representative.
For white noise, I often use Age of Empires games. I’ve got Survivalist’s Twitch stream open as I type this, but I couldn’t even tell you if he’s winning or losing at the moment because it’s mostly there as background noise.
Yeah, but the city council meeting I'm listening to is on the other side of the Pacific Ocean (Filipino here), so I couldn't do anything even if I wanted to. And given the geographical distance, the impact on my day-to-day life is.. zero.
But still, the stories I hear during the meetings are entertaining and they really do help me understand America just that little bit more. Curiosity for the win!
Hahaha yeah fair enough!
If you’re interested in another country, my city of Brisbane, Australia streams all its council meetings on YouTube, and we certainly have some…interesting debates. (I would certainly not hold it up as a good example of well-functioning democracy…)
I have a recording of the big machines where I work. Rhythmic clunking and whirring motors puts me right to sleep.
Doesn't that make you sleepy at work?
Yea, sometimes. There's usually enough other stuff going on it's not a problem.
My partner likes to listen to lofi music. Lately she's been obsessed with Baldur's Gate 3 so she plays a youtube video that's 10 hours of the "down by the river" song and a campfire sound from BG3. We've also done a 10 hour Star Trek TNG bridge noises video before for awhile lol
Lately my external HDD making old school hard drive clicky groans as it downloads overnight. I had forgotten computers used to sound like this until I bought it; it's nostalgic and soothing.
B17 bomber engine drone, gets me into the zone in no time. (Youtube > dl, cut to 2hr MP3).
Mixed that with a 2 hr refrigerator drone and it is perfect.
If you have an actual Radio, find an AM station that is just static. This works quite well.
Or just a pop country station. All the white noise you could ever need.
somafm.com has some good streams.
Good old hard disc defragmentation https://youtu.be/KR3TbL3Tl6M?si=LlS2vzdNkbcVx7c9
Either SoX running in Termux on my phone with:
play -n synth brownnoise synth pinknoise mix synth 0 0 0 10 10 40 trapezium amod 0.1 30
(originally yoinked from I can't remember who, in the early days of Mastodon)
or more recently, a 10-hour loop of the Sardukar chant from Dune. It's right about the right frequency to block a lot of the noise around here and it isn't anything intelligible for my brain to keep me awake thinking about.
If I just want some noise-blocking sound while I'm trying to code or something then myNoise has a vast array of sound generators. It was well worth kicking them $5 a while back.
what is "white nolse"? and why listen to it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_noise#Work_environment
Just background noise to listen to, because sometimes you just don't like silence.
Some people don’t like when it’s too quiet. For some it’s uneasy, for some it makes it too hard to stop your mind from wandering. That can make it hard to sleep or hard to focus on a task. White noise is noise that makes it not quiet, but isn’t so loud or too full of meaning to be a distraction on its own. Most people use something like ocean waves, running water, rain, wind noises, the warp core noise from Star Trek, etc.
It's also amazing if you have tinnitus. Soothes you like a baby.
White noise sounds like radio static.
https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/whiteNoiseGenerator.php
People listen to it for many reasons.
I have chronic tinnitus. My ears generate white noise for me without asking.
Without fail, the planet scanning part of Mass Effect 2 makes me incredibly sleepy, so in moments of infuriating insomnia, I've put on a video of that
a recording of my classes when the teacher isn't talking
it helps because it's just random people talking... I just have to make sure I don't talk while recording
As a hobbyist musician and coder: Csound. Cubic spline curves make particularly interesting noise.
Modular synthesizer. Modulating the white noise generator with a slow LFO to create a nice ocean wave background kinda sound.