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

  •  intensely_human   ( @intensely_human@lemm.ee ) 
    13•8 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.

      •  intensely_human   ( @intensely_human@lemm.ee ) 
        5•8 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.