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Show HN: My afternoon project - Pink Noise mp3.

pinknoisemp3.com

19 pointscr4zy18 comments

I was quite a fan of listening to pink noise at work but found after a while that I started to get aural hallucinations. It felt like my mind was finding patterns in the noise that weren't there.

Probably harmless, but it did make me wonder about any lasting effects of extended exposure.

Probably OK. People often see weird things when they are in sensory deprivation chambers. When you have no sensory input, your brain makes some up so that it has something to do. Not harmful.

(Unfortunately, I never get hallucinations from sensory deprivation. Sigh.)

I get exactly this with white noise, subtle chime sounds on a pentatonic scale. It made me want to do the realtime frequency analysis to see if I wasn't imagining it.

I get this effect too with white and pink noise. I'm able to minimize it by playing an additional audio track with a predictable pattern, like ocean waves. That seems to satisfy the pattern-matching part of my brain.

For those who instinctively checked the comments before googling:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_noise

Nice. I've been using http://simplynoise.com at work for a long time. (Brown noise) :)

I don't mean to be rude, but I may be missing something. Surely it didn't take you an afternoon to write an audio tag?

It's not the posting I find odd, but the upvotes. It's just an MP3 from archive.org being played by an audio tag, hmm?

Notes:

1. Favicon does not match page background.

2. Include a link to inform people about Pink noise: what it is, what benefits it may provide, etc.

Looks like my app engine quota overran. I updated billing so should be back soon.

Isn't it completely static? (no pun intended) You could host it on GitHub Pages for free.

Does gh-pages have any bandwidth limits?

They don't mention any. I remember someone saying that their normal traffic is so huge that GH Pages can't even make a dent on the stats.

The sound files appear to be from [1]. What is that that you did, but to wrap a player around them? Or are these originally yours?

[1] http://archive.org/details/TenMinutesOfWhiteNoisePinkNoiseAn...

Yep, they're creative commons. I just repackaged it on GAE to speed up downloads and simplify playing pink noise. I also turned down the volume a bit, since it's a little loud in the file:

  $('audio')[0].volume = .2;

pink noise < brown noise < Liquid Mind

I previously listened to brown noise daily until I found Chuck Wild's Liquid Mind albums.[1] The latter don't filter out environmental noise as well as brown noise, but I've found that they help me concentrate and minimize stress when my environment isn't noisy enough to warrant brown noise.

[1] http://www.liquidmindmusic.com/mp3/download.html

I have a pink noise generator in an old audio spectrum analyzer. Guess its time to dig it out now.

Mac users, grab Chill from the app store. It's great.

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