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Comment by neltnerb | Hacker News Reader

This also helps cover up constant early morning construction and traffic.

If I can help it I just use: play -n synth brown on any linux system with sox installed... it's definitely the cleanest sound I've found.

Problem with most phone programs is that despite brown noise being comically easy to generate live, they record a clip and then loop it so there's weird artifacts.

I honestly don't know why I don't have the ability to run such a trivial command for an open source system on my phone. If I paid for a phone app to make noise it'd be inferior for money. I don't know why it's not at least equal for money.

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Really cool command, although for some reason I find the brown noise it generates to sound harsher than the one from this website[1] for example.

The command I'm using is `play -c 5 -n synth brown vol -20dB`.

[1] https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/whiteNoiseGenerator.php

I tried this but the sound is too… white? Is there a way of making it deeper? I’m not familiar with Sox at all.

EDIT: actually in that short time I got what I needed: play -n -n --combine merge synth brownnoise band -n 550 550

Put it in a .command file, renamed it as .app, dragged it to the dock, renamed it .command, and now I can quickly trigger it from the dock at any time.

Thanks a lot!

I'm having the same problem. I found this command on a random site[1] which improves it a bit:

    play -n -n --combine merge synth '24:00:00' brownnoise band -n 750 750 tremolo 50 1

If possible I'd like to replicate the brown noise preset used on this[2] site.

If you come up with anything please let us know.

[1] https://www.cloudacm.com/?p=3145

[2] https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/whiteNoiseGenerator.php

I've settled on this over the years:

    play -c 2 --null synth brownnoise reverb bass 6 treble -3

It's close to the myNoise brown preset, IMO, if a little bass heavier.

Just tried this, as a longtime ambient electronic fan I totally understand what brought me there. Instant calm for my noisy mind using:

play -c 2 --null synth brownnoise reverb bass 10 treble -6

Diagnosed around 40, concerta helps with focus but does not provide a calming effect.

Thanks for this eye opener!

`Brew install sox` for those wondering how to get this working on macos.

I love all of your variations, thank you so much for this! I combined them into this one, which I really like, but I think I will play around a bit more :)

`play -n -n --combine merge synth brownnoise band -n 550 550 tremolo 50 1 vol -17dB reverb bass 10 treble -6`

That 2nd link in 'b'rown mode immediately makes me feel like I'm standing on the seashore on an overcast day... for some reason it brings memories of Disco Elysium. Exactly what I need today, thanks.

mynoise is the gold standard for generators, for me.

Investigated the characteristics of that page's brown noise preset: https://files.catbox.moe/ptql0b.png

Despite the sliders being a straight line, it's not really brown noise, as the slope starts going down again below 550Hz. (Which is a good thing in terms of being nice to listen to: this sounds more natural, and pure brown noise has too much bass to use with headphones.)

I was able to get pretty close (80% ?) in Audacity with Generate > Noise > Brownian Noise,

followed by Effect > High-Pass Filter > 550Hz (12dB roll-off).

To me, these sounds produce fatigue. When I used to travel frequently by air, I had a habit of wearing noise-cancelling headphones just to try to suppress the background, whether or not I actually played any other media over it. I didn't really like the leftover hiss, but cutting the deeper sounds seemed to reduce my fatigue anyway.

So, I am wondering how brown noise fans find the noises of travel. The different synthesizers posted in this thread overlap a lot with highway and airliner environments for me. Different vehicles had different equalization, of course.

Another sound this reminds me of is the old background rumble they put in the Star Trek Next Generation TV show to represent their shipboard environments.

I use a surprisingly complete shell on iPhone to synchronize git repo.

For some reason, that shell can go out of his own box, so he can write into obsidian files for instance.

The play command trigger the phone media player but there is a package manager and it’s akin to git-bash for instance. It ‘s provably a pain but it boils down to find the right binaries.

It’s called “a-shell”, there is others. I use this one for simple things but it can run cron for instance. It kinda changed how I use my old crappy iPhone. ( moving file around )

Thanks for the tip, this looks fantastic.

Is there anyway to create an http stream of your output?

I have a home automation on Hubitat to play a 10-hour brown noise file, hosted on a home Ubuntu server, created in Audition to play for night time on a Sonos speaker.

Would love to get rid of the file and just get a live generated output.

You can probably pipe that to VLC Not sure it’s the most appropriate, and you might need a file for it to plug to anyway. Not that can be a stream

Honestly your solution is probably already the simplest unless you're short for disk space. Maybe someone knows a way to make Ubuntu create a special file that contains a buffer with brown noise, like one of those old tape to CD converters, so that the system sees a music file but it just keeps going. It sounds like a lot of work.

Using 'play -n synth brown' is easy if it's an option. I'd probably use a sound file if it were harder.

> It sounds like a lot of work.

  mkfifo brown.wav
  sox -n brown.wav synth brown

?

Check out mynoise.net (or the mynoise app- "White Noise and Co" generator on the brown noise preset)

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