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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
LiveATC streams. If you are not listening it's a constant stream of radio-garbled jargon. Just pick a busy airport.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Star Trek TNG Ambient Engine Noise (Idling for 24 hrs)
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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…)
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.
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.
somafm.com has some good streams.
Good old hard disc defragmentation https://youtu.be/KR3TbL3Tl6M?si=LlS2vzdNkbcVx7c9
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/KR3TbL3Tl6M?si=LlS2vzdNkbcVx7c9
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
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 😌
I have chronic tinnitus. My ears generate white noise for me without asking.
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
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.
Japanese weather channel
Modular synthesizer. Modulating the white noise generator with a slow LFO to create a nice ocean wave background kinda sound.