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Comment by SimbaOnSteroids | Hacker News Reader

Imagine your smart home ecosystem that sounds like the Amazon ecosystem. That sounds like the kind of thing that would actually push me the extra edge to wire my home up.

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Back in the mainframe days I spent many late nights in the machine room doing systems janitor work. I could easily identify which workload was running, and what phase, by the ambient noise of disk and tape drives.

I can imagine your house chirping and tweeting about, when suddenly you wake from a deep sleep saying "what was that!" when some unusual pattern of sound happens.

The pattern matching and decoding portions of our brain never, ever, stop their efforts and are wired deeply in to the survival mechanisms we have.

Back when I built robots I could tell when they needed lube or bearings replaced by the pitch change in the motors on full power. I find it interesting that you figured out the same for a mainframe

I once read that Brian Eno did an experiment about this. He recorded something like 30min of outside noise in order to see if he could learn "how it goes," just like you learn how a piece of music goes. "Wind rustle, dog barks, more wind, a horn honk, then the garbage truck goes by and a bottle falls out and breaks," etc. It was a successful experiment.

I had a similar personal experience. For years growing up I slept to a white noise machine that played a 3-second recording of a mountain stream. I became intimately familiar with the clip and could anticipate every trickle, the changing pitches of different water droplets, and the length of the loop. I can still conjure it from memory in great detail.

Intriguingly, on a single night I experienced some sort of hypnogogic auditory hallucination that caused the sound to lose all familiarity. Instead, I perceived the sound of a male singer arpeggiating rapidly. I found it highly disturbing.

never knew how to phrase it, but I've had that a couple of times in the past few years. I've had to get really picky abouth the white noise sounds I listen to. Eventually, almost all the loops become identifiable - I can tell when the loop restarts, etc. I had two different loops (both of water sounds - waterfalls, maybe? - iirc) that, at some point, started to register as human voices, and it freaked me out more than a bit.

fwiw, the only thing that works well for me is masking any other sounds with a mix of grey and brown noise on top. i use 'white noise app' to achieve this, and it helps me get to sleep, masking out many other ambient disturbances (road/car noises, mostly).

For everything about noises, I highly recommend mynoise.net. It has a ton of high quality sound generator which does not loop. If it is too monotonous, you can automatically "animate" the sounds which modify continuously the sounds at different frequencies.

Until 3am, when auto-installed updates roll out :)

You mean Amazon as the Amazon river..?

You know, if I worked at Amazon, I would be very tempted to build something that plays river-and-rainforest sounds to indicate the health status of things.

Smoothly running stream? Everything is green. Rapids? Yellow-status; something needs looking into. Waterfall? Something's gone terribly awry.

Happily chirping birds? Successful health checkins. Monkeys screeching? Unhealthy result. Jaguar growl? Datacenter is on fire.

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