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Comment by dhimes | Hacker News Reader

For me, 'white noise' - type sounds- sounds of rainfall, waves, etc. [1]- help me focus. I usually work with nothing, bu one day when working in a noisy environment I discovered that putting headphones on and listening to 'sound of nature' tracks worked very well. So well, in fact, that now when I get stuck or am just having trouble focusing for any reason I do this.

[1] I think this is called 'brown noise' these days.

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I use:

  sox -r 48000 -n -d synth pink

with noise canceling headphones and a relatively low volume.

I also tend to listen to:

  sox -n -d synth sine %-5 sine %-14 vol 0.5

...but everyone else seems to think it's incredibly annoying.

    play --show-progress -c 2 --null synth 01:00 brownnoise \
    reverb 19 vol 0dB bass 6 treble -3 repeat 558

Adjust bass and treble to match your headphones.

It sounds like a big waterfall, or like a continuous wave crash. And it's stereo. :)

EDIT: Or this:

    play --show-progress -c 2 --null synth brownnoise \
    reverb bass 6 treble -3 echos 0.8 0.9 1000 0.3 1800 0.25

The one with echos is a bit softer and more natural-sounding.

Stupid question: Is it necessary to play something through a pair of noise canceling headphones if you just want to "cancel noise" with them?

Not with the ones I'm familiar with (Bose QC-15). You have to turn the headphones on to engage the 'active' noise cancellation, but you don't have to be listening to anything. In fact, you can unplug the cable from the ear piece completely and still hear (not hear?) the effect.

White and brown noises are slightly different.

You could check them out here http://simplynoise.com/

Excellent link! And the terms are explained, too.

EDIT: I just clicked the link 'simply rain' on that site- that is more like what I listen to.

These days, I tend to listen to this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXtimhT-ff4

I have a music composition and conducting background, so any kind of music ends up distracting me at some level.

Brown noise helps me concentrate a fair bit. Personally, I've got SimplyNoise generating brown noise in oscillation mode which sounds a bit like waves.

> [1] I think this is called 'brown noise' these days.

Yikes. What terrible branding!

"Green noise" is better, sort of honest, and obvious.

They are engineering terms, not marketing terms. The 'colors' are to give you an analogy of sound frequencies in the spectrum: White is a blend of all (audio) frequencies with equal intensities; with pink noise, the intensity falls off at higher frequencies (1/f), and with brown noise the intensity falls off faster at higher frequencies (1/f^2).

Yep. More detail (with samples) here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_noise

Sorry, I actually knew that -- I spent a few years of my life building production studios and doing audible spectrum tests.

Cheap humor though, I apologize.

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