What are the most unconventional sources of white noise you use?
What are the most unconventional sources of white noise you use?
I have started listening to random American city council meetings lately for white noise. Since they're all bureaucratic-flavored boredom anyway.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.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
Japanese weather channel
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.
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
- 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.
I found if I listed to upbeat music without lyrics I can generally focus better. LoFi Girl is great for this, and so are video games sound tracks.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=roMWEeV2P4U
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aFbCofgwdXo
Meshuggah
Old episodes of No More Jockeys https://youtube.com/@NoMoreJockeys
Sometimes I go to sleep listening to Soft White Underbelly interviews. There’s something wrong with me.
ADHD runs in parts of the family, and it's like a "mental rinsing agent" after paying the old ADHD tax.