I have started listening to random American city council meetings lately for white noise. Since they’re all bureaucratic-flavored boredom anyway.
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 recently discovered that the reason tinnitus is a thing is not psychological at all, it’s a degeneration/damage of the nerve endings in the ear. So since they found that, don’t give up hope that they’ll find a treatment for it.
It was a joke.
BTW - For anyone with F-Droid, I highly (highly) highly recommend Noice
It has:
- White noise
- Brown noise and pink noise
- Various background noise like cafe chatter, waves, rain, or birds
- Further improved my sleep ❤️
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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Yes, it’s one of the Alarm Clock options
It certainly was a little under a month ago when I had Legionaire’s! 😬
What were the French doing to your bowels?
Nothing good, that’s for sure!
Obligatory https://youtu.be/6ijI4HjTGkw
How battery intensive is it? I tried sleeping to a brown noise audio file in a normal music player app (Music Player Go) and my phone ran out of battery before my alarm went off, causing me to oversleep 😬
It used to be bad on the battery, but then it became a super big focus and now it’s great.
Yay! Gonna try it out for sure, then!
If you’re the kind of person that plays on their phone to fall asleep, get a 10’ cable so it can be plugged in while you’re doing whatever you do before sleeping.
This app was fully offline previously. Now with premium thing they removed it and i cannot turn of my mobile data to sleep. So this ruined the whole experience for me.
That’s the beauty of Foss. Fork it!
Or I might just have to find the older version 1.x and install it
Does it have creamed spinach noise? (“Creamed spinach” refers to the color used in the DMG Game Boy’s screen, as Sega referred to it in one of its Game Gear commercials)
Noice.
Shitty roommates. :(
On one hand, yea, on the other, #worth. They were great overall - Sometimes you gotta take some losses and some wins.
Seconded.
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?
I think literal noise is a good term for it.
Well, if you’re using it to isolate yourself, then I think noise is good for it. Like if you don’t want to hear the neighbors or roommates, noise is good because noise obstructs signals.
And more generally, noise refers to sounds that are not explicitly wanted or requested. Which is also what background is.
It’s a good question. I suppose it couldn’t hurt to instruct a chatbot to write a 20000 word essay on the question of what exactly the best term is, and then pipe that into the “say” command in mac os terminal and use my volume control scripts to make it sort of softly murmur in the background as I go to sleep tonight. I don’t think that would make me a crazy person. At least not right away.
Ambiance. I like that.
Words have more than one meaning and your use of it is completely fine imo.
White noise can also mean:
meaningless or distracting commotion, hubbub, or chatter
I agree we get to map definitions as we see fit. I propose we use the word “noise” for what you mentioned, and when the term gets longer it should refer to something more specific.
In the term “white noise”, the “white” refers to equal energy output in each wavelength, I believe. It’s distinguished from pink noise, brown noise, etc.
Of course, it should also refer to white nationalist propaganda, because there’s no way that could cause any confusion.
“I put a little white noise so I can go so sleep easier”
😬
No. There is occasional some yelling, both from and at the commissioners, I don’t want anyone to be startled out of relaxation.
I would refer to this as background noise, yes.
Brown noise always makes me think of the brown note
LiveATC streams. If you are not listening it’s a constant stream of radio-garbled jargon. Just pick a busy airport.
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 I’ve been falling asleep to shipping reports
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.
Yeah but then you get a Darius Rucker song and have to start all over.
That reminds me of The Venture Bros. There’s a villain called White Noise who is basically anthropomorphic television static in a humanoid shape.
He was a white supremacist television repair man before his “accident”.
The writing on that show was so goddamn sharp.
In my country, literally all AM stations are just static. We only have FM over here.
So much choice for white noise over here. Noice. (Rhyme time baby)
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.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.
Good old hard disc defragmentation https://youtu.be/KR3TbL3Tl6M?si=LlS2vzdNkbcVx7c9
I have chronic tinnitus. My ears generate white noise for me without asking.
S-tier video with all the details
I didn’t want to enjoy this but it’s somehow so relaxing
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
I have the music from that playing in the background now and I agree that it’s very soothing 😌