What are the most unconventional sources of white noise you use?

Lemuria@lemmy.ml to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 137 points –

I have started listening to random American city council meetings lately for white noise. Since they're all bureaucratic-flavored boredom anyway.

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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.

Man I know, and I tried them. None of them were quite right, they didn't accomplish what I wanted. Like the sound on the show is just a little different in real life. Part of it I think, is the treble (insert tribble joke)

It really all clicked when I fucked up and broke the speakers so it's all coming from the subwoofer

Also no I didn't solve that problem, I'm using an app called blackplayer, every ten hours it fades in and out for like a three second period. That's on my to-do list to fix, but not a priority because it doesn't bother me too much

Ok that’s actually really rad. I’m gonna have to fuck around a bit and see if I can do smth similar.

Logitech z313 is what I got, I just checked my order history and it was like $57. I'm going to try to track down a link for the audio file I use. I have the file, but I don't remember the source

I was thinking I could grab one from goodwill. It just needs to be the subwoofer that has the input and it’s g2g.

That'd probably be fine. I mean I haven't tested it a lot, but I think the secret sauce is just that it's all bass from the subwoofer. Let me know how it goes

I gave myself tinnitus

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.

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:

  • 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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

Shitty roommates. :(

On one hand, yea, on the other, #worth. They were great overall - Sometimes you gotta take some losses and some wins.

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.

LiveATC streams. If you are not listening it's a constant stream of radio-garbled jargon. Just pick a busy airport.

Star Trek TNG Ambient Engine Noise (Idling for 24 hrs)

Yoo check out my other comment. I play a brown noise through a subwoofer (no speakers) under my bed. It sounds exactly like the warp engines

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…)

Please, listen to the City Commission of Fort Scott, Kansas. It is so very dull.

Interesting. It looks quite dull from the thumbnails indeed. At the moment my current source of city council white noise is Spokane, Washington - the stories that people tell during open forum are entertaining and I sometimes hate how an amazing story gets cut off by the 2-minute limit.

No limit on how long someone can speak during public comments.

Well, Spokane enforces a 2 minute limit. What city do you recommend I listen to if I want to hear longer open forum stories?

EDIT: Oh wait, I replied from the inbox, nevermind. Fort Scott, Kansas is definitely the place.

People can ramble on about anything. Come on down! :)

So... if I have the money to fly down to Fort Scott do I get to ramble on for 3 hours about how their city council has been such a great source of white noise, generating additional white noise for me in the process that I can use once I return to Manila?

Please do. Our one good barbecue closed, please bring some good food. Also a gallon of calamansi.

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.

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)

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?

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.

There are many kind of noise. But white noise has all frequencies of sound at about the same volume. (Just like white light is a mix of many colors in equal portions.) Think of an old TV on a blank channel, a rainstorm, or a waterfall.

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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.

I like listening to crickets or cicadas when I’m falling asleep. Helps drown out my tinnitus

Hmm that's something that I might try out, as I have tinnitus for one of my ears

Modular synthesizer. Modulating the white noise generator with a slow LFO to create a nice ocean wave background kinda sound.

  • Late Night with Seth Meyers
  • Last Week Tonight With John Oliver
  • The Daily Show

I usually watch monologue / opening segments and pass out during the boring guest interviews.

Old Kitbogas

He’s still a superstar and the leader in his field, but it’s mostly background noise for the uncut versions I’m listening to for the fourth time

ADHD runs in parts of the family, and it's like a "mental rinsing agent" after paying the old ADHD tax.