I keep this in my .bashrc

alias brownnoise='play -n synth brownnoise synth pinknoise mix synth sine amod 0.3 10'

It sounds like waves gently coming ashore.

I'm sure I collected it somewhere here on HN, because I don't know anything about how the command works.

Edit: I have these, too, and I like them all:

alias whitenoise='play -q -c 2 -n synth brownnoise band -n 1600 1500 tremolo .1 30'

alias pinknoise='play -t sl -r48000 -c2 -n synth -1 pinknoise .1 80'

MacOS users can get get "play" by installing SoX (Sound eXchange)

    brew install sox

Thanks, I should have realized searching for "play" in a package manager was going to be a poor user experience.

I think it must be installed by default in my distro.

Not in front of my Linux box right now, are these tools built in or part of stand repository?

It's part of SoX which may be in your repo depending on which distro you use.

These are just using the 'play' command, the aliases are just so I don't have to remember the arguments.

Play is a standard package from your package manager

They'd probably be better searching for sox, not play.

Yeah, I think we cleared that up about four hours before your comment.

Thanks!

Personally, I just use brew to install SoX on Ubuntu.

brew is a really nice package installer that works with both MacOS and Linux.

sox is in the default repository (for example jammy/universe). And it will be suggested as an install if you try to run play when it's not installed.

So brew, any "killer apps" on brew for linux? What's nice to get from there?

Linuxbrew is pretty convenient for installing dependencies, especially on "stable" distributions like Debian/Ubuntu. You can install specific versions of dependencies that you want, even keep them side-by-side.

It's also distro-agnostic, so it works almost everywhere.

Looks interesting. It both says that installing without sudo is a feature, which sounds neat, and that installing into ~/.linuxbrew is an unsupported feature.

  # On Linux, it installs to /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew if you have sudo access
  # and ~/.linuxbrew (which is unsupported) if run interactively.
  HOMEBREW_PREFIX_DEFAULT="/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew"
  HOMEBREW_CACHE="${HOME}/.cache/Homebrew"

Wow these are great, thank you

Another vote for mynoise.net.

That site gives off strong "small web" vibes (good thing), and is clearly a product of passion (or at least, a product of competence in the field of sound/signal processing). My donation to get access to the full range of generators was worth every penny.

I discovered mynoise.net some years ago. As I lived near a church where the bells would be active every 15 minutes... It really helped to not listen to them.

The downside: the alarm clock was also less audible in the morning! :D

I really like https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/pureBinauralBrainwaveGener... which I can listen to for hours to mask external sound.

I'm surprised there's any churches left still doing that frequency. Is it a touristy thing or something? Definitely would have thought most at this point are down to hourly or even just once at noon, with an awful lot more silent but for special occasions like weddings.

It seems to be pretty common in Washington, DC. Offhand, I can think of St. John's Episcopal at 16th & H Sts. NW, St. Matthew's [Catholic] Cathedral on the 1700 block of Rhode Island Avenue NW. I think that the First Presbyterian Church at 16th & Kennedy NW does. All this is from just my regular commuting or running routes, so I suspect one can find quite a few more examples.

No. Pretty normal in Germany...

I have this problem that when I know that the such ambient noise is synthesised in any way, then my brain simply rejects it as if I knew it is a placebo so it no longer works.

Similarly if I listed authentic recorded ambient noise, once I recognise a loop point, it becomes extremely annoying.

That's why I can't use tools like mynoise.net.

I had a couple of solid 8 hour recordings from a cafe or office, but after a couple of listens I kind of learned it is a recording and they no longer work. Basically rather than focusing on doing work etc. my brain is listening for faint phrases, whether I heard it before etc.

The workaround I found is that I just have a window open so I can hear street noises, but this is going to be troublesome during the winter.

I am planning to start making recordings so maybe if I have a solid month worth of ambient noise, I will be able to trick myself it is not a repeat if it takes a month for a full rotation.

I can hear Shepard tones [1] in songs now. I remember the first time I heard it in a song, I was blown away, confused as to what I was hearing.

Later when it was pointed out to me that is is "a thing" I started to recognize them in other songs. I sort of miss being naive.

There's a line from one of Feynman's books where he is arguing with an artist friend who dislikes how Feynman (science generally) dissect a rose rather than just admiring its beauty. Feynman is incredulous as to how knowing more about a thing can take away from its beauty. (I may be slightly mis-remembering this exchange.)

That always bothered me because I felt that naïveté is a thing you lose with knowledge and that is not always a good thing.

Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer" [2] instead resonated with me.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone

[2] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45479/when-i-heard-th...

Shepard tone is popular for building suspense. The soundtrack for the movie "Dunkirk" leverages a pretty identfiable shepard tone for anyone interested in hearing a quick example.

First one I heard was in an obscure song by an obscure band, O Positive and their song (appropriately titled, "Up Up Up" — closes at around 3:00):

https://youtu.be/2na0hW0JGJ0

There's an Elliot Smith song with it as well ... I'll have to try to recall it.

One's a sensation, the other is a mental model of the sensation. Big difference.

You can direct your attention at one or the other. Maybe both to a degree but concentrated deep focus demands exclusivity.

There are mechanical ambient noise generators that generate sound via fans and rushing air in a special cavity; a popular one is the Marpac Dohm.

I've considered 3D printing custom shells for it to further tune the sound profile to achieve the brown noise ideal.

Your case sounds a bit extreme (perhaps it has an element of nocebo through overthinking it?), but I do share this problem to an extent.

If you like ambient music, I love Brian Eno’s ‘Reflection’ album and use it for a similar purpose as noise. But I eventually got sick of hearing it again and again, recognising the same bits... Then I found he has also released the original endless generator (from which the album is just an hour-long recording) as an iOS app. It’s wonderful. It’s just endless Reflection, never repeating, always sounding new, but always sounding like Reflection. Expensive but worth it, if you liked the hour-long recording.

If street noise worked for me I'd mount a weatherproof microphone outside the window, run a cable from it inside (maybe around the edge of the window) to a preamp driving a cheap Class D power amp, and drive one good speaker with it. Maybe put a graphic EQ in the chain after the preamp if I wanted to fiddle with the sound.

Winter problem solved. No bluetooth or batteries needed; just a wall wart or maybe USB-C.

Running the cable would be the trickiest part if I had close tolerance metal window frames. In that case maybe a bluetooth mic would be best, but I'd have to figure out how to weatherproof it.

I used this enough that years ago I paid them money just because I got so much use out of it. Haven't used it in a few years though, as lately I've been listening to more music than noise.

Thank you for this

It's pretty extreme to insinuate that users are bots with no evidence. I checked both users' accounts and find it incredibly unlikely that either is a bot.

shmerl, the user who mentioned mynoise in that link, has 11,234 karma and has had their account since 2011. rob74, the user you're responding to, has 5,923 karma and has had their account since 2016. Both are recently-active users with a history of real comments that don't mention mynoise.

Perhaps you are seeing this site mentioned frequently because users enjoy it and it fills its niche incredibly well. I previously came across it searching for a Shepherd tone generator and have found that it offers the best balance between tweakability and ease-of-use.

Dude. The site is great, and people mention it from sheer good will.

For anyone who visits, consider donating!

Someone asked if anyone knew how to make a certain noise and another user replied with a solution. How is that not relevant?

The specific link is to a data centre noise field, which seems more relevant than not if someone is asking for software generated HDD clicks.