Can brown noise turn off your brain?

Nice but I believe the handler to turn on sound didn't get brought over.

Another vote for mynoise.net.

That site gives off strong "small web" vibes (good thing), and is clearly a product of passion (or at least, a product of competence in the field of sound/signal processing). My donation to get access to the full range of generators was worth every penny.

I keep this in my .bashrc

alias brownnoise='play -n synth brownnoise synth pinknoise mix synth sine amod 0.3 10'

It sounds like waves gently coming ashore.

I'm sure I collected it somewhere here on HN, because I don't know anything about how the command works.

Edit: I have these, too, and I like them all:

alias whitenoise='play -q -c 2 -n synth brownnoise band -n 1600 1500 tremolo .1 30'

alias pinknoise='play -t sl -r48000 -c2 -n synth -1 pinknoise .1 80'

I discovered mynoise.net some years ago. As I lived near a church where the bells would be active every 15 minutes... It really helped to not listen to them.

The downside: the alarm clock was also less audible in the morning! :D

I used this enough that years ago I paid them money just because I got so much use out of it. Haven't used it in a few years though, as lately I've been listening to more music than noise.

I have this problem that when I know that the such ambient noise is synthesised in any way, then my brain simply rejects it as if I knew it is a placebo so it no longer works.

Similarly if I listed authentic recorded ambient noise, once I recognise a loop point, it becomes extremely annoying.

That's why I can't use tools like mynoise.net.

I had a couple of solid 8 hour recordings from a cafe or office, but after a couple of listens I kind of learned it is a recording and they no longer work. Basically rather than focusing on doing work etc. my brain is listening for faint phrases, whether I heard it before etc.

The workaround I found is that I just have a window open so I can hear street noises, but this is going to be troublesome during the winter.

I am planning to start making recordings so maybe if I have a solid month worth of ambient noise, I will be able to trick myself it is not a repeat if it takes a month for a full rotation.

OT, but almost every time I learn of a new feature of iOS these days, it seems to be hidden away in 'accessibility'; most recently the 'double tap' feature (which sadly doesn't work well).

I recently found this as well, via the Control Center item called Hearing.

There are some other interesting features behind this icon in Control Center as well: Live Listen, and noise levels for headphones, to name a few.

I thought I had insomnia for a decade, until the pandemic and moved to a quiet suburb. I now routinely sleep 9 hours a night.

As long as we allow modern capitalism to be the driving force of society, these harmful things will never go away

Car alarm ban in new models seems like a no-brainer. They create a nuisance and don't even work as intended. There are so many silent ways to notify the owner of potential theft. I don't mean with fancy smartphone stuff necessarily, I mean via the RF key fob everyone already carries. Some vibrate.

What's funny is CA outlawed ICE cars by whatever year but didn't touch car alarms. And a while back they mandated that truck reverse beepers be even louder than elsewhere, which is a trickier situation than car alarms, but I've noticed Amazon vans with white noise reverse sounds that do the job well.

on the other hand, the subtle noise of nature has a deep calming reach that I still find surprising

Same, also flapping tarp in the wind. I go to great efforts to stop this happening.

Also with the implication you're going to end up waking up in a wet sleeping bag!

As someone who has also spent a lot of time camping, rain hitting the tent of a roof, a metal roof, or even a tarp over a hammock is hypnotic and I love sleeping to it.

It’s one of my favorite sounds and puts me in an amazing headspace.

Maybe there were circumstances which led to us each experiencing the same type of soundscape completely different?

The worst are tracks that have "nature sounds" aka bird calls. Those make me very wakeful.

I think literally only Totoro finds 'big rain splat' to be enjoyable.

Same, I live by a busy road. Can't sleep without it.

These 3M 1100 earplus are magic. (You can get them at Screwfix in the UK.)

https://www.3m.co.uk/3M/en_GB/p/d/b00017649/

I always keep a few spare packets in my bag. On a few occasions (usually conferences) people have been grateful for them.

Do you recommend any songs or artists? I've never heard of Shoegaze music, but I might have a listen over the next week. Always nice to find new stuff

I haven't heard of this genre before. Are there a few tracks or artists you could recommend I start with?

Is shoegaze just another term for drone music?

I agree completely.

While not Shoegaze, the first time I realized my inner dialogue had stopped completely for a few seconds was after the first time I listened to Washing Machine (the song, not the album, though I was listening to the album in full) by Sonic Youth. Up until then I had never though that'd be possible: I always assumed we all had an inner dialogue going on all the time (I later learned some people don't have this at all, which I find intriguing, probably as intriguing as they find that some people always have one!).

This. Exactly this.

I'm more into post-rock (gy!be <3) but I totally relate to your feeling. This massive/overload wall of sound blanketing your brain.

Even if there's nearly no lyrics in post-rock, it is strictly impossible for me to work while listening to it.

And shoegaze/postrock are something you have to enjoy with headphones. The work on stereo is always phenomenal. (I wonder if some bands used binaural beats to go further this way. kinda reminds me I-doser ;) )

> As someone with a loud anxious mind who's also prone to auditory sensory overload I find certain sounds such as those found in Shoegaze music shuts this all off.

This is one of the main reasons for my love of extreme metal and other abrasive, noisy or drone genres. There are even shoegaze black metal bands (blackgaze) such as Andavald. The cacophony of the music drowns out the mental noise and I can focus on what I'm doing. Happy, up beat stuff, or clear vocals, seal focus and becomes an annoying distraction. Though classical music or certain instrumental music is soothing to me as well.

I remember reading that von Neumann was a fan of turning on the TV or radio to very loud volumes when he was working at home. Likely to achieve the same effect.

Putting aside the troll vocals and terrible underlying philosophies, some Black Metal has similarly lovely guitar soundwashes as well. It's an interesting paradox.

For those wanting to generate some sounds like the above, I made what is effectively a noisy synthesizer / visual demo a while back that can be played note by note on a PC keyboard (or will play itself if left untouched, see attached readme). But to get it into "wall of sound" territory you need to hold down the up arrow and/or space bar for quite a while to speed up the bike until the visuals start distorting:

https://acatalept.itch.io/eternalapex

Everything by Carbon Based Lifeforms is also very soothing, albums like Interloper, World of Sleepers, Hydroponic garden also really give me that feeling and with just a bit more beat and melody that I love.

The first track of Interloper just soothes me real quickly:

https://youtu.be/-9pgIVcB3rk

How about Dream Pop from groups like Still Corners and their song The Trip?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m2Lr_HqCfg

I find it very relaxing. I like how the beat seems to subtly change in different parts of the song - it could be an auditory illusion.

Brown note, actually, not noise.

Parker and Stone were just making fun of it and did not coin the term Brown Note.

The term is from the 1970s military research.

As with many South Park episodes, the topic they are making fun of is usually based on exaggerated facts. It's what makes their show still funny even after several decades.

Brown Noise is a technical term, along with Pink Noise, White Noise, etc.

The South Park episode is the first thing I thought of reading this title, honestly.

Agreed on the looping. I had a cheap white noise machine in the 90s, and once my brain identified the loop, I was locked into it and couldn't fall asleep.

But it's not as bad as hearing somebody in your white noise: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/mehrar

Drowning out inconsistent noise with generally predictive noise seems pretty intuitive to me, and I think the article touches on this simple explanation.

Nothing special or magical is happening in our brains, just not hearing interruptive sounds helps us not get distracted or awakened.

I've used SSP and let's just say I think it's nothing short of revolutionary. It seems to be completely changing how my brain works and how quickly it gets activated (in the sense of what state it is in).

Much like an alarm clock, some sounds are best heard only on demand.

Haven't played with them for a couple of years but can remember my "sweet spot" was when it sounded like the sound is coming from the center of my brain, not from from a left or right ear, not from the environment. It's a weird physical feeling, almost the same feeling I get from a small dose of psilocybin. Head feels slightly heavier too, esp near the backside. Eventually I stopped playing with binaural beats because I felt it does affect my brain in some way but I didn't know if it was good or bad, but my instinct at the time told me to stop.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/sep/24/a-hunter-gathe... I stumbled across this scathing review of the book while researching it. They didn’t hold back

> However, you should ask yourself why there is a need for trickery in the first place

Because my upstairs neighbors are assholes.

Highly recomend https://syntherjack.net/make-some-pink-noise-generator/

which gives four different circuits, they each have their own sound.

yes, they are pink, not brown, but pipe the output through a spare opamp configured as a low-pass filter and you can have "any color you like".

Then pipe that through a low-pass gate and you start to get some interesting bloops, and before you know it you are full-time building Eurorack modules.

Keen to blog about it or upload your scripts somewhere?

Interested to know more about your experience with uncompressed audio generated from pseudorandom numbers. Do you know what PRNG you were using? I would think the simplest common ones would indeed be terrible but it could be very interesting to study if something like the Mersenne Twister or better could be detected as "not truly random" in this way.

> I've been sleeping with exponentially-smoothed brown noise for years. I use a raspberry pi with its hardware random number generator because with pseudorandom numbers or compressed samples I hear all sorts of artifacts - no doubt at least partially psychological, but psychology matters when you're trying to get to sleep. Uncompressed samples are fine and can be looped without a gap, but that's less fun.

Well, there have certainly been a plenty of bad RNGs in use.

> because sampling thermal noise (which is brown)

It's not. You need a filter to get pink/brown noise out of it

Any cryptographic pseudorandom number generator (or hash function, equivalently) should be completely indistinguishable from random noise. Although, frankly I don’t think you should need to go that far. Almost any PRNG should do it, it’s really only the simplest ones that have noticeable periodicity.

From TFA: “ There isn’t likely to be any danger in listening to BROWN NOISE for, say, eight hours at a time, Dr. Berlau said, unless someone plays the sound at unsafe volumes (listening to noise above 70 decibels over a long period of time can damage your hearing).”

Running Bluetooth through your brain all night probably isn’t great either

> It was a bad night

> It was a surprising restful night.

Is not a night of bad sleep often followed by a night of good sleep?

Aren't AC/fans/etc considered white noise?

> Yesterday night, I just make the A/C runs its fans all night.

If you run it every night, and if you're doing it just for the noise, understand that your next month's electricity bill is going to be quite... shocking.

We used to run box fans at night in our bedroom when we lived in apartments to drown out the sounds of neighbors and traffic noise. We continued the tradition when we bought our first house. One day I decided to get some real data on what our energy spending was and plugged a box fan into a kill-a-watt. I don't remember the exact number but it was high enough that the very next day I bought a "white noise machine" for every bedroom in the house and our monthly electricity bill dropped IN HALF. Basically paid for themselves in the first week.

The best white noise machines are made by "LectroFan". These used to cost $15 on Amazon, now they are $50. Whichever brand you buy, the most important thing is to get one with a good-size speaker so that it can reproduce lower frequencies decently.

you can soundproof your sleeping room, just need to dampen frequencies that offer direction cues, they are above 1khz. electronics, car sound whooshing, rattling all produce those frequencies. if it's hard to dampen enough - dampen as much as you find economically viable and raise noise floor by running ventilation or big diameter fan, it will mask the rest of them.

also having fresh air ventilation (with soundproofed intake - they use quiet fan) is much more comfortable than having windows opened on busy street.

best "baby sleep sounds" is when their head is curled up against your chest. And you both drift off. Bliss.

wavtones.com has what I believe to be the highest quality stochastic noise generator but there is a $7 paywall to access colors besides pink and white.

Why does your account read like every comment was written by an AI? They are all so gerneric, most of them seem to directly relate to the title but nothing else. You've also never gone into any discussion after leaving your initial comment.

I doubt it. Like noise, it might reduce sensitivity to stimuli, though, which can reduce distraction and thus make it easier to focus your attention as a side effect.