A Soft Murmur – Ambient sounds to wash away distraction
asoftmurmur.com
asoftmurmur.com
Gabriel - please add wind. It goes well with the rain/thunder thing. The rain sound track - it sounds realistic, but I think for this specific purpose a bit less emphasis on high frequencies might make it blend into the background better. It sounds a little too hissy. Might just be my sound setup though. I'd also suggest adding a "true" white noise track - I'm guessing much of the tech crowd would love to use that as a baseline and then add specific noises on top.
Wind would be a great addition I agree. I've had a hard time finding good audio that has the right feel, but it'll be added at some point.
White noise is on the todo list. What I really need to do is make the audio loading more modular. At the moment it's very naive and everything buffers at once. I want to create a system where there's a core set of sounds that load by default, and then a menu of sounds that expand and load when selected. This would mean I could support a lot more sounds. At present, to add another sample I'd have to remove something already there, because performance is a little flaky even with just the six current samples.
I really wouldn't change the layout to anything menu like. Its got the clean & simple thing going for it. Maybe rather add a button that opens "advanced" options i.e. more sliders coming into view - white noise etc. Seems a bit artificial but it gives you a way to split off less popular and weird stuff like artificial white noise. Plus delayed loading of those sounds. Adding a drop down or similar would kill the clean layout in my view.
Since you reacted positively to the initial feedback:
- The share mix button at the top looks wildly out of place. Its outside of the main rectangle and looks weird as a result.
-I'm allergic to the word "share" tbh...consider replacing it with "publish"/"broadcast" or similar. Sounds a bit presumptuous...but "share" has become a seriously craptastic word online - even erotic sites have a "share on facebook" button. If you must have it rather move it as far down as possible - so that users can first toy with the sliders a bit & get a feel for things before being asked to vouch for it to friends.
- The colour scheme (stark black white) is not conducive to the tranquil vibe you're trying to convey. Best bet is adding some colour hint to it I think. Keep the basic idea, but add some faint highlight colour(s). Think earthy warm colours.
- The humans track is way too loud. If you set all the sliders to mid then all you hear is humans. Either lower it as a whole or dampen the 600hz-700hz frequency range gently (assuming my ears aren't failing me on that freq guestimate).
>I've had a hard time finding good audio that has the right feel
Yeah. Wind is a bit of a biatch in this regard since most microphones are engineered to specifically block wind noises. And those that aren't distort wind sounds like mad. Maybe something like this (bit short):
I struggled a bit with the positioning of the share button - I'll think about it some more. I hadn't considered that it's the first thing a new visitor sees, and I agree that's undesirable.
I used the wrong word when I said "menu". I actually had "palette of sounds" down before changing it because it sounded too pretentious. I was thinking of menu in the restaurant sense rather than the UI sense. I agree I don't want to overload the interface with more options.
I'm not 100% happy with the visuals or the audio samples either, particularly humans and rain as has been pointed out, so I'm going to look at cleaning them up.
1) Rustling leaves in an aspen grove.
2) Wind-whipped snow covered mountains (howling winds)
Both quite different but pretty cool in the right mix.
I think its fairly dependent on the climate you grew up in. e.g. I'm from a fairly warm/dry climate so "storm" sounds mean rain & relief from heat. Plus the local farmers are much happier (except when there is hail involved).
>damage the building you are in
Again - never occurred to me. Its just a non-issue here. Buildings are built to last & we don't get natural disasters here.
Sufficiently strong weather and uncontrolled fires could put you at risk, but the extremely vast majority of my experience with these sounds has been with the safe varieties -- I don't think I'd find it as calming otherwise.
sadly, does not work on mobile either (somewhat on firefox for android which is too slow on my underpowered phone)
I LOVE your "Fade to Slient in ___ minutes" feature. Perfect for inducing sleep.
Thanks! It's my favorite feature too. I probably need to tweak the UI a bit to made it to make it more prominent though.
Boodler FTW!
It works from Firefox browser on a phone (sliders don't function with Chrome and it fades out immediately on Dolphin and Android browsers.) An equalizer (even Baxendahl 2 knob tone control) would be cool but would probably be a drag on the server.
FWIW regarding sleeping to ambient sound, I have an extensive collection of 'phones and 'buds of all types for R&D purposes and the hands down winner for 'buds to sleep with is the Sennheiser CX200.
(Irrelevant aside: For $19 at Amazon they are also by far the best bargain I've encountered for pristine sound.)
I'm sure it would be a major effort, but it'd be nice to have the tracks crossfade into one another; right now, when a given track ends, there's a short and variable, but noticeable, interval between ending and restarting, whose presence is not a major issue but still less preferable than its absence.
It's not possible to do true seamless looping with HTML5 audio, but the site tries to achieve it by crossfading, as you say, using two tracks for each sample. On my setup the transition is imperceptible. I'd like to work out why it didn't work for you.
Safari 6.1, Mac OS X - Listened to "Thunder" track for 10 minutes; no noticeable break.
Firefox 24.0, Mac OS X - Did likewise; result likewise.
I'll have to try it again from home tonight and see whether it behaves better in the absence of the latency problem. Sorry for being so vague; I tend to try to characterize bug reports better than I have this one, but I was in the middle of too many things when I wrote my original comment and didn't take the time I should've.
I would be great if you could a) download your mix as an MP3 and/or b) open your mix in a popup window.
Love the sound of rain and thunder. Makes me want to stay indoors and do stuff. I understand that this is at the moment not a problem for North Americans and Europeans but in Australia it's getting pretty hot/sticky at the moment..
The popup window idea is also good and should be much easier to implement. I'll look into it. Thanks!
Talk about hitting a home run on your first at-bat. Well done!
- maybe you could add some trees or forest option - coupled with birds it makes a good spring/summer ambient
- when decreasing the human option, instead of just decreasing the loudness, it should decrease the number of people speaking ; so many people in the background, even if they seem far, doesn't make this too cozy
There's a lot of ASMR youtube videos, which I find very relaxing and helps to get in the zone. However, sometimes it also helps me to fall asleep, which is bad when I want to work. Anyway, ASMR puts me in a state that is highly focused and relaxed at the same time.
any studies on what types of noise actually induce deeper sleep?
I assume this is something deep in my psyche, implanted when I was very young.
This motivation is very deep inside me: I went as far as giving out two free rooms to benefit from the comings-and-goings of two more people. And for a while I shared a house with my in-laws (8 people total) and found it quite enjoyable.
The sound of fire and humans is something new I've seen (or heard) in such a site.
What about cricket chirps, and to be a little bold, traffic ? Traffic in the distance ?
I really should probably write this up on my blog... I will - and post it on HN but here's a quick overview. I'm doing this for a JavaScript library I'm working on for form-validation for the visually-impaired (coming soon!)
I dynamically create a pool of audio tags via
var audioTag = document.createElement("audio")
then
audioTag.setAttribute("autoplay","autoplay");
then
audioTag.src = strSound;
You don't even have to attach them to the DOM either from my experience so far (cross-browser!), just maintain the reference in memory.
Then I do some eventing magic for forms and validation stuff, loading the audio from strings of Base64 encoded mp3s or wavs. This way I can package the audio I use inside the JavaScript that hooks up all the form events. And make it easy for others to override my audio samples with their own just by over-writing the strings in memory via their own .js file include.
I'm working up a simplified example to post right now. My library has a lot of extraneous stuff related to cross-browser eventing and integrates with browser extensions, so I think it would be needlessly confusing to illustrate what we're discussing
Please add white, brown and pink noise (Like http://simplynoise.com/ has).
If you do that, I will be 100% sold!!!!
It is why airplanes are such great places to concentrate and work.
Also lower light and fewer people "induce the zone" better too.
I think the fact that you really really can't get up and go do something else also helps. ;)
1. silence or some monolog/dialog on tv = BAD
2. lots of people talking & background noise = GOOD
brain is weird.
This might just be me though - I think in German, read in English and hear Afrikaans in coffee shops. So I'm all kinds of messed up anyway when it comes to spoken language.
Great stuff.
Because we evolved as animals being preyed upon by large predators, big cats, packs of dogs etc.
When our preyed-upon ancestors heard the sounds of a rainstorm they knew that they could sleep because the predators don't usually hunt during a rainstorm, and that the predators could not smell them during a rainstorm.
Evolutionarily, selection wise speaking, those who slept during a rainstorm got rested and were better rested afterward, and so were more likely to pass on their genes.
The rainstorm is the friend of the prey animal.
That history is written in our physiology, just as every major environmental factor is written in our physiology.
When I pick up a bug or a leaf or a dog or...any organism, I can see traces of that natural history written onto shape and curve of that organism's body. The dog has sharp teeth, the better to bite its prey, my dear. The leaf has a green skin, the better to turn sunlight into energy, my dear.
Of course the rainstorm has left its mark on your physiology. How could it be otherwise.
And here is the real mindblower--homo sapiens and american society and all parts of it are also part of the natural world. Political talking points and memes are quasi-organic, and their shapes tell you things about their natural history, too. Mind blown?