I have started listening to random American city council meetings lately for white noise. Since they’re all bureaucratic-flavored boredom anyway.

  • acid_falcon@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Not too weird, but I found this accidentally: a subwoofer under my bed (the speakers that came with it broke)

    I found a ten hour long brown noise mp3 that is set to loop indefinitely on an old burner phone. Through the subwoofer it sounds exactly like the warp engines from Star Trek TNG. Incredibly comforting, and hard to sleep without

    • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      There are actually videos of warp engine noise.

      Have you found a way to loop that MP3 with crossfade? My current problem is there’s a small noticeable gap of silence between repeated tracks.

      • acid_falcon@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Man I know, and I tried them. None of them were quite right, they didn’t accomplish what I wanted. Like the sound on the show is just a little different in real life. Part of it I think, is the treble (insert tribble joke)

        It really all clicked when I fucked up and broke the speakers so it’s all coming from the subwoofer

      • acid_falcon@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Also no I didn’t solve that problem, I’m using an app called blackplayer, every ten hours it fades in and out for like a three second period. That’s on my to-do list to fix, but not a priority because it doesn’t bother me too much

    • june@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Ok that’s actually really rad. I’m gonna have to fuck around a bit and see if I can do smth similar.

      • acid_falcon@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Logitech z313 is what I got, I just checked my order history and it was like $57. I’m going to try to track down a link for the audio file I use. I have the file, but I don’t remember the source

        • june@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          I was thinking I could grab one from goodwill. It just needs to be the subwoofer that has the input and it’s g2g.

          • acid_falcon@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            That’d probably be fine. I mean I haven’t tested it a lot, but I think the secret sauce is just that it’s all bass from the subwoofer. Let me know how it goes

  • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
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    11 months ago

    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

    • The Giant Korean@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.

    • Resol van Lemmy@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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)

      • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
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        11 months ago

        On one hand, yea, on the other, #worth. They were great overall - Sometimes you gotta take some losses and some wins.

    • mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      11 months ago

      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.

    • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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 😬

  • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    That’s just noise. White noise is a specific kind of noise.

    My weird way of using white noise is I have a set of scripts to precisely control my volume. I turn on a video of white noise on youtube, then I run my script to slowly, steadily raise the volume up to whatever level I want.

    The entire point of the script is to avoid a clear moment when the noise starts or stops. To further hide the transition from consciousness, I have delay built in, and I recently added randomized delay between volume increments.

    I run the script, and an hour later brown noise is blasting in my room, but I never have to be conscious of it.

    • Lemuria@lemmy.mlOP
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      11 months ago

      So “background ambience” would be a better term to describe the city council meetings?

      • Grimy@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Words have more than one meaning and your use of it is completely fine imo.

        White noise can also mean:

        meaningless or distracting commotion, hubbub, or chatter

        • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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          11 months ago

          I agree we get to map definitions as we see fit. I propose we use the word “noise” for what you mentioned, and when the term gets longer it should refer to something more specific.

          In the term “white noise”, the “white” refers to equal energy output in each wavelength, I believe. It’s distinguished from pink noise, brown noise, etc.

          Of course, it should also refer to white nationalist propaganda, because there’s no way that could cause any confusion.

          “I put a little white noise so I can go so sleep easier”

          😬

      • verity_kindle@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        No. There is occasional some yelling, both from and at the commissioners, I don’t want anyone to be startled out of relaxation.

      • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        I think literal noise is a good term for it.

        Well, if you’re using it to isolate yourself, then I think noise is good for it. Like if you don’t want to hear the neighbors or roommates, noise is good because noise obstructs signals.

        And more generally, noise refers to sounds that are not explicitly wanted or requested. Which is also what background is.

        It’s a good question. I suppose it couldn’t hurt to instruct a chatbot to write a 20000 word essay on the question of what exactly the best term is, and then pipe that into the “say” command in mac os terminal and use my volume control scripts to make it sort of softly murmur in the background as I go to sleep tonight. I don’t think that would make me a crazy person. At least not right away.

        Ambiance. I like that.

  • proctonaut@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    I have a recording of the big machines where I work. Rhythmic clunking and whirring motors puts me right to sleep.

  • Uwu_im_toxic@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    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

  • Underwaterbob@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    As a hobbyist musician and coder: Csound. Cubic spline curves make particularly interesting noise.

  • Coreidan@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    I like listening to crickets or cicadas when I’m falling asleep. Helps drown out my tinnitus

  • writeblankspace@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    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

  • Trent@lemmy.ml
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    11 months ago

    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.