I have started listening to random American city council meetings lately for white noise. Since they’re all bureaucratic-flavored boredom anyway.
ADHD runs in parts of the family, and it’s like a “mental rinsing agent” after paying the old ADHD tax.
Japanese weather channel
Sometimes I go to sleep listening to Soft White Underbelly interviews. There’s something wrong with me.
a recording of my classes when the teacher isn’t talking
it helps because it’s just random people talking… I just have to make sure I don’t talk while recording
I watch my city council meetings attentively. Local politics has an enormous impact on your day-to-day life and it’s also an area where being informed and engaged is most easily able to actually effect the outcome you want. City councillors are more likely to have their view swayed by a modest letter-writing campaign than your Member of Parliament/Representative.
For white noise, I often use Age of Empires games. I’ve got Survivalist’s Twitch stream open as I type this, but I couldn’t even tell you if he’s winning or losing at the moment because it’s mostly there as background noise.
Yeah, but the city council meeting I’m listening to is on the other side of the Pacific Ocean (Filipino here), so I couldn’t do anything even if I wanted to. And given the geographical distance, the impact on my day-to-day life is… zero.
But still, the stories I hear during the meetings are entertaining and they really do help me understand America just that little bit more. Curiosity for the win!
Please, listen to the City Commission of Fort Scott, Kansas. It is so very dull.
Interesting. It looks quite dull from the thumbnails indeed. At the moment my current source of city council white noise is Spokane, Washington - the stories that people tell during open forum are entertaining and I sometimes hate how an amazing story gets cut off by the 2-minute limit.
No limit on how long someone can speak during public comments.
Well, Spokane enforces a 2 minute limit. What city do you recommend I listen to if I want to hear longer open forum stories?EDIT: Oh wait, I replied from the inbox, nevermind. Fort Scott, Kansas is definitely the place.
People can ramble on about anything. Come on down! :)
So… if I have the money to fly down to Fort Scott do I get to ramble on for 3 hours about how their city council has been such a great source of white noise, generating additional white noise for me in the process that I can use once I return to Manila?
Hahaha yeah fair enough!
If you’re interested in another country, my city of Brisbane, Australia streams all its council meetings on YouTube, and we certainly have some…interesting debates. (I would certainly not hold it up as a good example of well-functioning democracy…)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
streams all its council meetings on YouTube
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I have a recording of the big machines where I work. Rhythmic clunking and whirring motors puts me right to sleep.
Doesn’t that make you sleepy at work?
Yea, sometimes. There’s usually enough other stuff going on it’s not a problem.
BTW - For anyone with F-Droid, I highly (highly) highly recommend Noice
It has:
- White noise
- Brown noise and pink noise
- Various background noise like cafe chatter, waves, rain, or birds
- Further improved my sleep ❤️
Back in University I used it to sleep right through a massive party my roommates threw when I had a midterm the next day. 10/10 app
Noice.
How battery intensive is it? I tried sleeping to a brown noise audio file in a normal music player app (Music Player Go) and my phone ran out of battery before my alarm went off, causing me to oversleep 😬
If you’re the kind of person that plays on their phone to fall asleep, get a 10’ cable so it can be plugged in while you’re doing whatever you do before sleeping.
It used to be bad on the battery, but then it became a super big focus and now it’s great.
Yay! Gonna try it out for sure, then!
Shitty roommates. :(
On one hand, yea, on the other, #worth. They were great overall - Sometimes you gotta take some losses and some wins.
Seconded.
Brown noise
Ain’t that the one that makes you shit yaself?
Not quite, that’s the mythical ‘brown note’.
Obligatory https://youtu.be/6ijI4HjTGkw
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/6ijI4HjTGkw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
You’re thinking of the brown NOTE, which has not been proven to actually exist.
It goes something like this:
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White noise is a mixture of all frequencies audible to humans, which sounds quite high pitched. It’s excellent for focus, against tinnitus and just for it not to be too quiet. Helps a lot of people sleep too.
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Pink noise is the same thing except tweaked to sound lower yet still “crisp”. It’s been shown to generally be even more effective for falling asleep than white noise.
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Brown noise is the same deal yet deeper still. It’s been shown to be effective against anxiety and, at least in my own anecdotal experience, against anxiety-induced insomnia.
On top of all these benefits, a combination of all three is what headphones and earbuds use for active noise canceling, an effect you can also achieve to some degree yourself.
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Yes, it’s one of the “Alarm clock” settings
It certainly was a little under a month ago when I had Legionaire’s! 😬
What were the French doing to your bowels?
It’s a lower frequency noise, some people enjoy it more. As a bad analogy, it’s a bit more like hearing a “waterfall” (brown noise) than “wind” (white noise)
I for one prefer brown noise. Could be a result of me working on a ship for a long while. I always found the deep engine hum with the sea against my porthole to be very soothing. Plus, the rocking motion didn’t exactly hurt either.
Does it have creamed spinach noise? (“Creamed spinach” refers to the color used in the DMG Game Boy’s screen, as Sega referred to it in one of its Game Gear commercials)
This app was fully offline previously. Now with premium thing they removed it and i cannot turn of my mobile data to sleep. So this ruined the whole experience for me.
That’s the beauty of Foss. Fork it!
Just installed. This is sweet as hell.
I was kind of surprised that Office was one of the noises you could play. I would probably have work nightmares falling asleep to that.
Does it include the 2000s corporate landline phone sound? *shudder*
I think so yeah 😖
This and the other trek ones are great. Especially the TNG night shift bridge.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Star Trek TNG Ambient Engine Noise (Idling for 24 hrs)
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Yoo check out my other comment. I play a brown noise through a subwoofer (no speakers) under my bed. It sounds exactly like the warp engines
Without fail, the planet scanning part of Mass Effect 2 makes me incredibly sleepy, so in moments of infuriating insomnia, I’ve put on a video of that
I have the music from that playing in the background now and I agree that it’s very soothing 😌
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
- Late Night with Seth Meyers
- Last Week Tonight With John Oliver
- The Daily Show
I usually watch monologue / opening segments and pass out during the boring guest interviews.
I have chronic tinnitus. My ears generate white noise for me without asking.
Either SoX running in Termux on my phone with:
play -n synth brownnoise synth pinknoise mix synth 0 0 0 10 10 40 trapezium amod 0.1 30
(originally yoinked from I can’t remember who, in the early days of Mastodon)
or more recently, a 10-hour loop of the Sardukar chant from Dune. It’s right about the right frequency to block a lot of the noise around here and it isn’t anything intelligible for my brain to keep me awake thinking about.
If I just want some noise-blocking sound while I’m trying to code or something then myNoise has a vast array of sound generators. It was well worth kicking them $5 a while back.
I gave myself tinnitus
Is that bit the reason people listen to white noise? Seems counter intuitive
Tinnitus is a constant whine. Other actual noise helps prevent having to constantly be thinking and feeling the whine because the “white noise” has your ear dealing with other things.
It isn’t the reason everyone listens to white noise but people with Tinnitus could help themselves go less crazy if they listen to white noise.
It was recently discovered that the reason tinnitus is a thing is not psychological at all, it’s a degeneration/damage of the nerve endings in the ear. So since they found that, don’t give up hope that they’ll find a treatment for it.
It was a joke.
It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Old episodes of No More Jockeys https://youtube.com/@NoMoreJockeys
I like listening to crickets or cicadas when I’m falling asleep. Helps drown out my tinnitus