I wanted to share with you fine folks something that is a bit of a passion for me—white noise hunting. Totally weird, I know, but even with me not ever having any real trouble sleeping, I have always slept better with something like a fan or ambient noise. In fact, I find it disturbing to not have some kind of reliably patternistic noise.
Not sure why I am sharing this. I guess I just realize that whether I’m at the office or working at home or sleeping, this is a part of my life. Enjoy!
Honestly at first I thought you were talking about the paranormal white noise. That’s been around since radio and TVs were invented with vpices and imagines coming through before there was even broadcasting stations
I use to be kind of iffy half believe in that stuff. Until we got bored in Iraq and started playing with digital voice recorders in buildings we would take over. Just to kill time make the night or day go by. After that what I heard I don’t play with ghost anymore
I only use white noise because I wake easily to random sounds if they’re not drowned out by the white noise. I don’t like white noise when I’m awake, and I especially dislike unintended white noise in my audio equipment.
Funny you mention that, because I’ve experienced this a lot and so have a few other people I mentioned this to.
Namely, I’m trying to sleep, have the AC’s fan on, and I hear what sounds like a teevee program in the background. Voice #1, voice #2, canned laugher, like a talk-show or game-show or whatever. Loud enough I can hear distinct voices, just not loud/clear enough to make out the words.
“Damn! Who’s blasting that teevee so loud that I can hear it over the fan?!?”
I turn off the fan, and… dead silence. Nothing. No stray voices, no radio, nothing, just dead air.
Fan back on, lie down again to sleep, and sure enough, the “radio” is playing.
a couple of my favorites that helps me to sleep is one being a light rain all night on the RV roof, and second is the frogs, crickets, and owls noise in the background in the country or wilderness.
I get that too, I think it is either that the white noise cancels the other white noise out and allows you to hear more than you would without it (plus the nighttime hearing increase from less overall ambient noise) or the white noise acts like a carrier wave and amplifies certain other noises (like a rouge wave is two waves in sync, making a bigger wave, or in this case a louder noise). I love a good fan going, but when this happens, it is a bit aggravating. I usually point the fan at a close wall to increase the ambient noise level.
I do however hate the subwoofers in cars and trucks as they drive past… if Bose would make a subwoofer cancellation speaker for homes, I would sell a kidney to get one. A kidney and a spare appendage if it also blocked barking dogs…
Well that’s a flashback. Driving all night across the country listening to AM fade in and out. Art Bell would come on. Is George Noory still doing the show? I don’t think I’ve listened to that show in 15 years.
I could tune right in, to the airplane and spaceship. The spaceship probably more because it has a rhythm like it's alive.
I've always been a very light sleeper. I feel as if I'm not asleep, but bordering REM. My senses, especially my hearing, the sound is as if it's amplified.
I can hear a silent light switch turn on at the other end of the house. What really bugs me about my ability to hear light sounds, I can hear the current traveling through the filaments of incandescent light bulbs.
When they're on a dimmer switch, I'm like a dog to high pitch frequency. It drives me nuts sometimes.
I was thinking something a little simpler, that with the right “balance” of frequencies in the white(ish) noise, there’s that tendency to see faces on rugs/toast/etc., to see goats and swans in star patterns, etc., and “create” a soundtrack that sounds like a conversation or whatever.
The discrete fan I have right by me (to actually drown out teevees), I don’t “hear” any such conversations.
They’re made for cars, so I don’t see why not. Need a mike where your head would be when sleeping, and multiple other mikes in the room. A powerful-enough 3D processor could calibrate itself to the main mike, and work on quieting down sounds. (A car’s a fixed environment, so only needs to be calibrated at design-time.)
I can’t sleep without a fan on anymore. Partly because I get too hot, and partly for the noise. I’ve started collecting and cleaning up box fans. I’m quite fond of the noise my all metal box fan produces because it’s a lot lower than your standard plastic one.
I’ve always lived in an area with cars driving passed, and only half a mile from a huge steel mill so I can hear the trains running at night.
