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Comment by pYQAJ6Zm | Hacker News Reader

I tend to always keep a fan running for the same reason. Even when the weather doesn’t make it necessary – I just put in a corner of the room facing against the walls. Its noise helps.

With music, instead, the less I know a piece the more attention it draws. I can’t work with background music for this reason. But Brain.fm barely has this effect on me, curiously.

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If you like white noise, it might help you to save on electricity turning off the fan and trying one of these two aliases I keep around for noisy places:

Pink noise (not sure if it's actually pink noise):

    play -c 2 -n synth pinknoise band -n 2500 4000 tremolo 0.03 5 reverb 20 gain

Ocean:

    play -n -n --combine merge synth pinknoise band -n 1200 1800 tremolo 50 10 tremolo 0.14 70 tremolo 0.2 50 gain  -10

The play binary is provided by SoX (sox.sourceforge.net). Worth mentioning that I did not create these, but I cannot recall where exactly I got them from.

Or with USS Enterprise background

   play -c2 -n synth whitenoise band -n 100 24 band -n 300 100 gain +20

I guess the difference is that music for listening is intended to capture attention, whereas music for focus should direct attention to where you want.

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