Why you hear voices in your white noise machine | Hacker News Reader

Why you hear voices in your white noise machine

wired.com

26 pointsjon_adler54 comments

There's another possible explanation for this, depending on how the white noise machine is built.

Unshielded speakers can act as AM radio receivers. I've had old speakers play extremely faint music while not plugged into anything; a few minutes later it identified itself as the local radio station.

Many AM radio stations are permitted to crank up their transmit power at night, exactly when many people might use white noise to sleep.

It's wild how easily things can act as AM receivers. A pencil and rusty razor, or a tooth filling and saliva.

When I was taking my electronics courses, it was fairly difficult to not build an AM receiver. Any time we were working with PLL or high gain amplifiers attached to a speaker, you'd eventually hear AM talk radio come out of someone's project.

Yeah, it's just a bandpass filter (very easy to make by accident) and an amp.

> The first time I googled this random noise-during-noise, I panicked. Apparently hearing things that aren’t there is referred to in the psych biz as auditory pareidolia, or auditory hallucinations, and is a hallmark of schizophrenia—and some experts say it requires a psychological check-up.

I feel like it's important to note here that something like 1 in 100 people hears voices without schizophrenia, it's kinda quite common. I'm one of them. Paragraphs like this don't help with people's perception of this phenomenon though.

I think it’s reasonable to recommend a doctor’s visit to rule it out, though. I’d personally feel better if I were experiencing that and a doctor said there was nothing more serious going on.

That goes to show how variable the human condition is. I had an MRI a while back for an unrelated issue and the doc found that I have a Chiari malformation in my spine near my brain stem. I’ve never had any symptoms from it whatsoever. Before MRIs were common, it was expected that a change the size of mine would cause problems, because when people with symptoms got surgery to fix them, that’s the size range the doctors found. Turns out there are a lot of people up and about with those same measurements who’d never know unless it turned up on a test like mine did. Go figure.

Hmmmm…

> Any app or machine you listen to that produces a color of noise, like white, brown, pink, green, or otherwise, is based on an algorithm or a code.

Well, brief aside: Brown noise isn’t a ‘color’ of noise - or if it were, it would be red. It’s just named after Robert Brown, the motion guy.

> It’s not truly random—so you’ll get a little while of what seems like random noise, and then the sounds repeat.

This is a complete misunderstanding of how pareidolia works. You’re not picking up on pseudorandomness or actual repetitions that are really hidden in the noise - you’re making up patterns out of the randomness itself.

Same thing that a diffusion-based image generator does when it squints really hard to find the picture of an astronaut riding a horse hidden in a noise field, by amplifying the bits that look most astronauty or horsey.

So, there is an astronaut riding a horse hidden in a noise field?

If you believe it enough, yes.

A running bath or shower will sometimes trigger "I can hear vague people talking type noises" for me (and has for decades) - not to the point of actually hearing voices with distinguishable words though, it's always just the vague "there's people nearby talking". Which can be really creepy if you're the only person in the house...

Have you ever taken hallucinogens?

I have always had the same with the sound of lawnmowers, since I was a kid. There was no difference before or after the time in my life that I tried hallucinogens.

I did and my affliction makes the effect so much better than I hear from friends. A glass of shroom tea taken outside has me see full armadas with theatrical music marching through the skies. LSD well, I haven’t taken it for 30 years because I have with shrooms what others have with lsd, just a lot shorter.

Not a single one. Only alcohol (rarely) and caffeine (frequently) that would be counted as "drugs".

I hear singing, voices and a lot more in the shower. Sometimes a complete orchestra; I have tinnitus from damage (black metal frontman for decades) and a very active imagination. I like to listen to it. Sometimes when we are on a long trip and I don’t have to drive, I hear the same in the air conditioner. I enjoy it.

I get the same with white noise - and also with complete silence. Sitting by the weir on the river works too. I hear symphonies. Beautiful renditions of Rachmaninov, etc. - I find it rather interesting that there are evidently chunks of my brain dedicated to storing music at perfect fidelity - or at least it seems so.

I have aphantasia, so when I close my eyes most of the time I see nothing.

But sounds - on queue I can "pull up" a song and play it in my head - full orchestra, guitars, etc. I'm not very musically talented by my brain certainly runs on sound vs vision.

When I'm in the shower sometimes (like this) I'll hear something like a shout or a voice - it occasionally happens randomly too in other situations - but I certainly don't think it's some discarnate spirit - there is usually something else to accompany it and I assume it's my brain filling in the rest.

This actually pretty accurately describes what goes on inside my head - no pictures, but a life soundtrack.

The "voice" in the noise is unintelligible, so I figure I'm safe until it starts to tell me to do things I should not.

> I have aphantasia

Also.

> on queue I can "pull up" a song and play it in my head

But I also do not have that. Starting to feel a bit short-changed here.

I wonder how common this is. I've never experienced it, or heard anyone else ever mention it was a thing so I assume it's not very common. No mention in the article about it but that could just be because no one knows.

When a couple people get together and chat in a room at a higher volume than usual, I can hear voices in the noise generated by a water faucet or shower when I get home. I think it's like the Tetris effect but with audio -- I have to concentrate quite a bit to track the various conversations while in the first setting, and when things quiet down, the ol' radio still wants to tune to a channel...

>Tetris effect

>https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect

>They may see colored images of pieces falling into place on an invisible layout at the edges of their visual fields or when they close their eyes

Interesting, I work as an agronomist and get this if I’ve been scouting for some problem that requires special focus to find, like cutworms, for prolonged periods of time. I’ll get faint images of them when I close my eyes.

Not disturbing in the slightest, I just knew I’d been hard at it.

This happens to me almost every night before falling asleep. I like to think I'm actually just composing what I'm hearing in my head! It almost always takes on a genre like bluegrass or orchestral or electronic. Very cool I enjoy self-made illusions!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia

Hypnagogic hallucinations are common. They're most intense for me when I'm falling asleep in a very quiet room. You don't need a source of noise for this.

This put the fear of God in me when I was a child. Sleep paralysis, which often joins it, feels quite frightening to a kid who doesn't know what's going on.

I have an air purifier next to my bed that creates a pretty loud white noise-like sound

Whenever I’m tired - which is practically every night these days (8 month old baby) - I end up hearing distant music from the air purifier

I find it rather soothing.

This immediately made me think of this Reply All episode: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/mehrar/147-the-woman...

Sigh, I miss that show.

Humans: overly aggressive pattern matchers!

Since our entire perception of reality is a carefully controlled hallucination based on our fairly crude sensory inputs, this is not surprising at all.

It's too late on the East coast for an existential episode... Thanks... :P

My use of a white noise machine has recently increased significantly with the arrival of my first kid. I spent so many nights bouncing her to sleep in the dark, trying to determine if the classical music coming faintly through the white noise was a product of my sleep deprivation, or something else. Now I have a likely answer: both!

I still hear faint music in the white noise sometimes, as recently as last night.

> Sometimes it’s music, like a full orchestral score

For me it's usually something like a full orchestra. I assume that is because our brains are already trained on the erratic arrangements and multitude of different sounds of a real orchestra - it pattern matches the noise better than say smooth jazz.

could also be that orchestral music is usually recorded or listened to at a larger distance than other genres

This was something I noticed, too, when I'd leave my Dyson fan on at night in my bedroom. To me, it didn't sound like voices, it sounded vaguely like chiptune music.

Of course, I'm a lifelong gamer, so I think that reinforces the idea that it's something your brain is trying to interpret--and hence it's shaped by things familiar to my brain. My wife heard something similar on a different night and described it as something else. But we were both in agreement that it definitely went away as soon as I turned off the fan.

I find it rather interesting when it happens, actually. It's my brain subconsciously doing creative musical improv--which I am far too inept to do consciously. I wish I could remember the melodies long enough in the morning to try my hand at transcribing them.

> Any app or machine you listen to that produces a color of noise, like white, brown, pink, green, or otherwise, is based on an algorithm or a code. It’s not truly random—so you’ll get a little while of what seems like random noise, and then the sounds repeat. On the surface, it probably doesn’t seem like it. But your brain recognizes the pattern and tries to make sense of it, which leads to hearing noises that aren’t actually there.

Many white noise machines are actually looping a 5 second recording of white noise. This is hard to notice at first, but it leads to the pattern recognition in the article.

I've found that this phenomenon is much less pronounced with white noise machines that generate actual random nosie.

I used to listen to a lake background noise sound, I would just have it on for hours while programming or relaxing. But at some point I heard that there was a little plopping sound, just some water that splashed in a certain way to produce that sound.

And soon I heard it again, and again, and again. I knew the audio looped, but having detected a distinguishing sound like that plop broke the illusion for me completely, I was no longer listening to the calm waters of a lake, but a looping wav file.

The real reason we spot patterns where there aren’t patterns is because the human sensory system is tuned by natural selection to err on the side of caution in borderline cases. Our ancestors who thought they saw a wolf in the shadows and took cover are the ones who survived to pass their genes on, because sometimes there really was a wolf there. Their peers whose senses lacked that safety margin got picked off.

That can't be a real reason the same way that any explanation "bolted on" as a coping mechanism for rationality can't be. It's equivalent to god of the gaps.

Diana Deutsch has something called the HIGH-LOW effect, where one ear hears the words high and low repeated, and the other ear hears the same thing, but in opposition so when one ear hears HIGH, the other heard LOW.

After a while of listening to it with headphones on, you'll start hearing different words phase in and out.

Pretty wild.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240322191603/https://www.wired...

I've definitely experienced this with things like an air conditioner emanating classical music...went through the same process of freaking out only to be relieved by a professional.

One thing I'd notice -- it was way, way worse if I was severely sleep deprived (which is not often anymore).

I've heard this called Musical Ear Syndrome because it can manifest as either muffled random voices, or random music.

Sometimes drugs trigger it. I was on a medication for a week that made my washroom fan seem to emit choir music. It was quite entertaining.

This happens to me occasionally. I don't use white noise machines but I might hear babble in wind noise, etc. Actually the source that triggers this the strongest is the rain SFX in the video game Escape From Tarkov.

When I am tired and/or drunk, i can totally interpret sounds of a running dish washer as electronic music. It is relaxing and amusing

Some might say, that says something about electronic music ..

Hearing voices would terrify me. I only hear crickets in mine. (And, y'know, never outside of it since real crickets are extinct now.)

Um, I have a 6 month old and every room in my house has a white noise machine for naps.

I've never heard a voice in any of them.

This might be a personal problem.

It’s called auditory pareidolia. A more personal example for you would be hearing your 6 month old crying in the store, only to suddenly realize you went there by yourself.

I can't finish wired articles. It seems they are never going to get to the point. What's the tldr?

Yes. I scrolled and found it by chance: "Simply put, your brain is trying to figure out what it’s hearing, so it’s filling in the gaps of the noise you’re listening to with a common sound."

Cmd+f found no mention of AM radio in there, which is another possible explanation for hearing voices or music in those machines. If I were hearing that, I wouldn't appreciate this article telling me it's in my head.

Thank you.

Agreed. I always read the first few paragraphs then see that I'm not even 1/8th of the way down the page but have gotten all of the info I need and click off and read HN comments.

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