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Comment by Hackbraten | Hacker News Reader

> Moore and his white noise team — yes, he has five employees and contractors

I assume their duties are mostly mundane things, such as accounting, marketing, vendor relations, and app (store) maintenance.

But what I really like to imagine is that those five employees are cryptographers, and that their duty is to painstakingly work on new secure white noise generation algorithms in order to push the envelope in the white noise industry.

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I like to imagine white noise listeners would be like wine connoisseurs in your scenario.

"Mmmmmm, this one features a nice static base noise livivified by a hint of perlin noise."

It's only white noise if it's generated by the Sennheiser algorithm, otherwise it's just random static.

The Haters usually take a microphone connected to a distortion box and scrape it around the surface of a textured plastic suitcase. The result is clearly white noise and easily differentiated from the all too common pink noise one tends to hear nowadays.

"Yes yes, of course that's a nice balance, but I do rather prefer mine to have just a hint of oak leaf crackle, like those that remain at the end of the Fall"

Well, honestly there's a world of difference between the noise generated by Pete Swanson versus Merzbow for example. I can't handle Merzbow at all, but Pete Swanson's A&Ox0 I truly enjoy. For example, my most listend song over 2021 (>60 times) is Limited Space by an alias of Pete Swanson; Yellow Swans.

Than there's a track like Treetop Drive 3 from Deathprod that you truly notice when it starts, and when it ends. Other than that it is phenomal in drowning out everything on the other end.

Windy & Carl also make some great tracks, one of my favorites being Antarctica. I've noticed while sharing these tracks that it is a very personnel thing, so odds being that you share my favorites are remarkebly small, though I do find it a very interesting genre to explore and wonder about - what makes this good versus the other?

With less noise and a seeming one-off is Virginia Waveform from Pan-America, though quire more melodic already

I have a curated playlist of noise tracks that I very frequently get back to. Here's my playlist for anyone that is interested: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0srqN53JGNoqEN3vzoviJU

I expected a playlist of Rick astley songs. I guess there’s a whole form of „music“ I am not aware of.

This is fascinating. A whole genre I cannot appreciate at all and yet a genuine fan. Amazing.

I find it fascinating as well, especially how I can scroll through a recommended ambient playlist provided by Spotify and only pick 1-2 songs from the lot. And on further exploration I often think to myself - damn, this is some good ambient, let me add it to my list - only to find I've added it already. Kinda proving to me that it's not just circumstantial appreciation but something that stays for a while I guess.

> Limited Space by an alias of Pete Swanson; Yellow Swans

This is my first time listening to this "genre" of music and I love it!

Wow, this is the first time I see someone with musical tastes so close to mine. Like you said, a lot of this music feels very personal. So this feels weird now, like meeting a long lost twin. I could have made that playlist.

I was never really able to pinpoint what makes this music good to me. It has to be a mix of the actual sound, texture and repetitive nature of the drone.

Have you heard the collaboration between Fennesz and Jim O'Rourke? https://christianfenneszjimorourke.bandcamp.com/track/i-just...

Ohhh this must be marvelous and can't wait to check it out! I really appreciate this tune from Fennesz - Tom but have a really hard time with both the brevity of the tune, and finding similar styles.

https://open.spotify.com/track/2iHvSdltCRLlCVYAjRxLNj

On another note. Do you know the project The Dead Texan? its another alias from the artist behind Stars of the Lid and it's an album that just seems to get better with every listen.

Especially the Aegina Airlines is very evoking, though not directly up the alley of Noise I'd say.

https://xkcd.com/915/

Well, I only listen to white noise that fills buffers that are allocated using new and lovingly filled with an artisanal memcpy.

I hope you zero the memory first! Otherwise you can hear the ghosting on good headphones.

Ghosting problems are why I refuse to listen to anything on machines with RAM older than DDR4.

Surely you mean newer? The quantum tunneling artifacts on modern dense memory are simply ghastly, which why I stick to hand-wound magnetic core memory.

Only way to go is w/ either magnetic core memory or isolinear chips.

Expert here (degree in engineering), Analog core wounded memory or gtfo.

I guess that comes at the significant penalty of lower bit rate. Still, it does sound warmer.

(Seriously, I wonder what the rate would be?)

WTF? Doesn't anyone just reverse bias a transistor anymore? Who needs memory?

To be fair, there are a large variety of "noises" in this arena that people have certain preferences for over others.

Developing an algorithm that generates something that sounds very good to humans requires a bit more than simple math and entropy.

"White noise" is just the entrance to a very large rabbit hole.

I’m listening to Metal Machine Music right now , feedback may be another rabbit hole next door

This does suggest a moderately interesting application: a sleep tracker could provide feedback to selectively alter the composition of the background noise to improve sleep quality. It could vary the background noise based on your sleep phase and other ambient noise (sirens, pets, etc). If you wear a tracker while awake, such as an apple watch, it could even figure out how to start based on your activity level just before going to bed.

>But what I really like to imagine is that those five employees are cryptographers

Or may NSA workers running the modern equivalent of number stations.

>new secure white noise generation algorithms in order to push the envelope in the white noise industry.

written in BrainFuck I assume https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31585371

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