One thing I didn't realise till recently, is you don't need spotify to generate white noise if you have an iPhone/iPad, as it's an in-built function under accessibility --> Audio/Visual and background sounds.
Interesting to note the size of the samples that Apple is using:
* Balanced noise: 1.8MB
* Bright noise: 1.8MB
* Dark noise: 1.8MB
* Ocean: 62.4MB
* Rain: 63.7MB
* Stream: 72.1MB
That's a lot of effort to ensure your background water sounds are (presumably) high fidelity and non-repeating!
So it doesn't matter whether a sequence is finite or not.
And the size of those files implies they are probably minutes in length, at the very least, so you probably don't notice the repetition.
In theory one can construct a chaotic (this is a precise definition) function with very little data that could replicate that class of noise with finite data.
Infinite lists are also another beautiful construct in lazily evaluated languages.
Doesn't need much to generate. It would need a wide counter but a MB is a lot of bits.
If you start talking about true “infinity” then sure. You need to store enough state (or if you like, receive some input) for your computed output to be unique. And counting to infinity takes infinite amounts of memory. Infinity is not accessible to humans, and is best thought of as a thought experiment rather than a part of empirical reality.
But if you do 44kHz samples, a counter stored in a 32-bit integer that ticks up once per sample is enough state to give you all unique [i.e. non-looping] samples for about a day. A 64-bit integer will give you all unique samples for 13 million years. With a 75-bit integer you can get all unique samples for longer than the history of the universe so far.
So in practice, the “increasing” amount of memory required doesn’t (necessarily) grow fast enough to worry about.
I saw this trick and used it to animate different parts of an animation (each part every p frames, where p is a prime) and it works very well.
1. mixing "white rain" with "88 keys" to focus at work
2. downloaded an hour-long "white rain" to use as background noise for my newborn
The fact that the site author literally travels around the world and records noises makes it so much more interesting to me that your average digitally-generated-white-noise app.
Drive someone nuts trying to figure out why it seems like they hear a noise every time they unlock their phone.
I won't do this though because I'm pretty sure it would be a violation of the Geneva conventions.
What’s strange is that iOS gives you no indication of where that sound is coming from…I guess I expected to be able to pause it somehow. Interesting, though!
The idea of having a setting that makes my phone emit continuous noise until I turn it off is absolutely wild to me.
My guess is the accessibility setting is for people that can't use Siri for whatever reason?
Weird reasons like...not trying to create a voice profile of yourself for corporations?
I also have a mini one for when I travel, which has a battery and can double as a BT speaker. I do sometimes forget this when I travel, especially for short trips, so the iPhone feature is a good reminder. I think I heard about it before, but without using it, it’s easy to forget.
Fairness is simply not possible on these platforms, you can have the most polished product and sit totally ignored because of all the scams and schemes, I can't imagine how many people who don't have alternative opportunities like I did that are literally dying just trying to get a chance to be heard on a fiasco operation like this that literally and happily pays others to do absolutely nothing, while they charge creators for subscriptions and ads.
It's a really frickin bleak indicator as to the value of human labor going into the future... If the people who aren't providing value constantly win over the people that strive to, everything falls apart, and we'll end up in a total scheme economy.
As valid creators, we all need to back off and stop posting anything at all on social media and big platforms to highlight the total crap that is popular on the platform. A much better way is to create and maintain our own small independent sites and to link to each other more.
You can literally run a fan or leave a radio on a dead frequency to get white noise... You don't need a streaming service for that. This is ridiculous, and the article only serves to promote this brand of fraud. It's not capitalism, it's simply fraud from many facets.
Marketing is indeed a necessity, but Social Media was developed under the premise of providing free "social" marketing for artists that aren't profiting from their work yet... These platforms have undermined that now into requiring absolutely all artists to pay for ads in order to be viewed, which is completely contradicting their original EULAs... Spotify in a way is a social platform, but more-so it is also a marketing platform that despite allowing people to promote, also creates a dynamic where success is tiered and artificially hard-limited by their algorithms.
Content displayed on the front pages of sites like Spotify, YouTube, Reddit (etc.), get the most views and plays. These sites intentionally only have front pages, with pre-designated featured content. That means that only the artists that land there get the lion share of the revenue from those sites... They provide little to no relative potential for success or visibility to the majority of artists that contribute content that they benefit from, and that makes the entire industry a pyramid scheme.
Unknown and unsponsored artists cannot succeed in this model, and even if they do somehow find an opportunity, they are often subject to predatory contracts from record labels and the larger industry as well. It's really insane what goes on behind the curtains.
Tom MacDonald is another (without getting into any politics). He makes a ton of videos and his songs have content that makes people want to share them. He had several songs hit the Billboard Hot 100 last year according to Wikipedia. I don't think he was even on steaming until recently due to a collaboration, just YouTube and selling physical CDs himself. He won't sign any of those predatory contracts, so things may be more difficult, but actually owning your music has it's value.
Both of these examples had a mix of hard work, talent, and luck, but that doesn't seem differnet than pre-social media when people were trying to get a record deal. Eminem just happened to hand his CD to a guy who worked with Jimmy Iovine after the Rap Olympics, had he not done that... who knows if we'd know who he is (I think it was the interview with Mike Tyson where he talked about this). If you've watched Jeen-Yuhs on Netflix, it shows no one wanted to give Kanye a chance as a rapper. Even though he was in the business, everyone just saw him as a producer, not a rapper. He had to push hard and keep asking for people to give him shot and got lucky one day when somene let him to a verse (I think Jay-Z). Jay-Z is another... no one would give him a deal, so he started selling his own stuff and made his own label (from what I remember hearing).
Breaking into the music business as a top artist as never been easy. It seems like the differnce now is the barriers are down, so it's more about getting people to listen instead of getting an record executive to like your stuff. It's hard to now if the market is any more crowded or if it's just that the consumers have full access now, instead of having to go through the gatekeepers.
I don't remember this. It might've been a bullet point in some fantastical interpretation of potential, but you'd have to be naive to think this was how it would play out. Doesn't take much thinking to see that every free platform gets overrun with hopefuls and spam and the platforms need a way to either rank content or monetise it.
Spotify and co provide distribution, not marketing. If it was as trivial as "create social music platform, get coverage for my music", you and every artist could do it, right?
Not that I don't sympathize with your struggles, but aren't the people who are creating background noise tracks doing exactly that, providing value? The article talks about tracks with natural noise or ambient noises, so it's not exactly the same as turning a fan on. I can't see how this is a scam.
Also from the article, there's a team of five making some of these, so it's not even accurate to label them as low effort (though I'll admit they're probably admin and marketing roles...).
> I have about 30 songs up there, All in all I've probably only gotten about 1,400 streams
That's only 46 listens per song. That suggests to me that you're not self-promoting, or doing something wrong. Even if there weren't white noise tracks on Spotify with 100k listens, there are millions of songs with <100 listens; even if the Spotify exposure algorithms were "fair" you wouldn't get any more listens than you already have.
I'll refrain from salty comments concerning the quality of my work because you're already sold on the ideal that the platform is totally ethical, despite many well selling artists saying the same things I have numerous times.
The platforms exist to promote artists, they do not do that at all.
It's really not for me to defend the merits of my work in response to expressing my experience on the platform... It's really not for you to insult someone you know nothing about, who says they've worked hard. You should really think about that... I have solid success in many other places than Spotify, and that's why I dedicate my time there and not to Spotify.
I listen to a lot of music, mostly noise / ambient / drone and do so mostly during work, so the hours stack up quite rapidly. Per the Spotify model this is quite beneficial for the artist. But I am rather picky in the noise I appreciate so in the end it’s not that many songs I keep. Most I visit once and turn off halfway. So I definitely wouldn’t want to call it easy to create good ambient / noise.
Anyway the other day I saw a YouTube video with 116M views of 9 minutes long that showed hands going into slime. Now compared with a video from say Carfection or PBS EON, that’s quite odd than.
There are people literally recording ceiling fans and then putting it on Spotify, and using low-effort production techniques like play bots to steal royalties from hard working artists. That's what I'm referring to. The only way that Spotify can really fix that is to rely less on algorithms, ban payola, and bring back real curators... But for the sake of their profit, that's not likely to ever happen.
This article is about a platform of hundreds of thousands of artists (or more) and you're using 2-3 artists you loosely observed to say that everything is fair. Thats not a real conversation at all rooted in fact. Far off the topic of making it about me.
I was shocked over the amount of tranquility music we sold. Tranquility was nature sounds. I didn't know about white noise back then, but we probally had it. It was basically music produced cheaply that supposedly relazed people.
I got it. People are stressed. Did listening to calming nature sounds help me--no, but listening to AM radio on a boring station does calm me down, or keeps negative thoughts away.
My sleepy time music was Classic music. Pretty much everything.
Even then becoming a musician was as hard as becomming an artist. There was just no formula besides 1 in a million talent, like Elvis, or just sheer luck, and that meant exposure.
(I am thinking about leaving an old iphone strapped to a tree to record creek sounds tomorrow, and plop it on Spotify under "Songs to calm. Natural, and organic music."), or never leave my house and produce it digitally?)
I never had luck with that to be honest.
I’ve tried all classical playlists including all “Classical for Sleep”. It’s just too emotional with a lot of peaks and crescendos. A lot of treble. Demands a lot of attention to itself.
“Sleepy” jazz on the other hand is often comforting, muted and warm.