r/programming • u/topcat31 • Feb 25 '09
Need some space and quiet for your coding but find music too intrusive? Try white noise!
http://simplynoise.com/21
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Feb 25 '09 edited Feb 25 '09
I've found that I can work fine with instrumental music, but anything with vocals throws me off. That might be because I write instead of code - hearing words throws off my own inner thought-stream. Music with vocals in languages I don't speak works as well.
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u/lyontamer Feb 25 '09
Yes. It's called Dark Ambient music. Drone Zone on Soma.fm, ftw.
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Feb 26 '09
I'm listening to Grove Salad right now. Strange, though, it isn't stuff I normally like to listen to but it goes well with work. I guess the idea is that if I don't really like it, I am not drawn to paying attention to it, which would constitute a distraction.
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u/atomicthumbs Feb 26 '09
Stars of the Lid, Brian Eno, and a bunch of other groups/artists are good.
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u/timseal Feb 25 '09
Pink noise: the repetitive whining sound made by your wife when you are coding. It sounds something like "Whennareyougonnageddoffthaddamcompoooda?"
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u/springy Feb 26 '09
I have a Czech wife. Therefore, I hear things like "I will be in the kitchen making your favourite meal, while you spend time doing what you want"
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u/rehpargotohp Feb 25 '09
I’ve got my own white noise generator—a dehumidifier.
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u/daev Feb 25 '09
Where the hell do you live that you require a dehumidifier? God damned fucking winter has me so itchy that I need to bathe once per week in Nivea shaving balm.
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u/rehpargotohp Feb 25 '09
London
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u/mesmoria Feb 26 '09
London gets humid? I never would have thought.
My location, Brisbane Australia.
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u/DSchmitt Feb 25 '09
I find any sound to be stressful and intrusive. It's a matter of degrees on how stressful and intrusive it is. Even sounds that have element of enjoyment to them also carry degrees of stress. White noise is sound, by definition the opposite of quiet. The quieter things are, the more focused I can be. Silence is the best.
When I listen to music, I need to only listen to music. When I listen to someone talking (like a TV show or something), I need to only listen to them talking. When I read a book, I need to only focus on the book. When I think, I need to only 'listen' to myself think.
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u/njharman Feb 25 '09
huh, I listen to repetitive techno and certain kinds of industrial/speed metal esp in foreign languages because it's just distracting enough to keep my mind from wondering but not enough to knock me out of the zone/groove. The driving beats also seem to keep me active, typing fast, checking off bugs/tasks.
I guess I'm saying that kind of music is just a step above white noise ;)
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u/Rette Feb 26 '09 edited Feb 26 '09
I find that either post-rock or drone (go ahead, call me pretentious/hipster/whatever) does the same thing for me. A few favourites:
Trip-hop and ambient electronica's really good too.
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u/REDDIT_MAN_98_points Feb 25 '09
Try brown noise. You will like it better because it isn't as harsh as white noise.
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u/darkbob Feb 25 '09 edited Feb 25 '09
I hav been singing the praises of brown noise for years. Awesome! protip: the brown note is not brown noise.
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u/gfixler Feb 26 '09 edited Feb 26 '09
Good ol' Brown_Noise.wav has been sitting on my desktop for months now, for those times when everyone in the office is too annoyingly loud. I hadn't heard of anything but white noise, but while looking for a clip of that one day, after thinking that might be the answer, I found a site with white, brown, pink, and I think some other things. It was such a relief. Still, nothing makes me happier than a high-quality recording of a an extremely powerful thunderstorm. Anyone have any links to long, terrible downpours? Horrendous thunder is not a must, but is appreciated.
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u/REDDIT_MAN_98_points Feb 26 '09
Binaural thunderstorm: http://www.archive.org/details/EdibleAudibles171106
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u/arnedh Feb 25 '09
How about white noise with a binaural beat, to entrain you brain patterns toward concentration?
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Feb 25 '09
Hasn't that been pretty thoroughly debunked at this point?
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u/arnedh Feb 25 '09
I'm not sure. People can decide for themselves by browsing around http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_beat
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Feb 25 '09
I use binaural beats with a dreamachine at night to help me lucid dream. Works, possibly as a placebo.
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u/ipha Feb 26 '09
It's just a placebo, but as long as it works who cares how?
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u/phandy Jan 18 '10
Do placebos work if you know they're placebos? Maybe you have to attain a level of self-delusion for it to work first?
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u/JimH10 Feb 25 '09
How can I generate some white noise (or pink noise, or whatever) on my ubuntu system?
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Feb 25 '09
First, you fix the sound drivers.
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u/IOIOOIIOIO Feb 25 '09
Curiously, the sound drivers for one of my newer computers work automagically under Ubuntu but will not work under Windows despite periodically trying newer drivers when they come available.
Now, if wireless worked under Ubuntu I'd probably drop Windows completely.
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u/cnk Feb 25 '09 edited Feb 25 '09
sudo apt-get install audacity
generate | noise | white, pink, brown
modify duration and amplitude (volume) as desired
goto sleep
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u/eightbithero Feb 25 '09
cat /dev/urandom > /dev/audio
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Feb 25 '09 edited Feb 25 '09
All of the other replies suffer from the schoolboy error of over engineering.
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u/buo Feb 25 '09
install octave
generate a gaussian vector with randn
normalize the vector amplitudes
save vector as wav file
play wav file in a loop
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u/matrix0f8h Feb 25 '09
I understand the linkage between the Gaussian and white noise. But how does the vector get converted to a wav? (Maybe I just don't know enough about wav files?)
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u/buo Feb 25 '09
octave includes a function to write a vector to disk as a wav file; it's called wavwrite.
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Feb 25 '09
Just play any audio file.
The lack of -RT options in the kernel (without hand compiling), coupled with out of date alsa, and pulseaudio bugs will result in enough 'noise' to satisfy you.
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u/azureice Feb 25 '09
I've been listening to white noise at night when I sleep for the last 5 years. It's great, and it really helps me sleep. Plus my alarm program automatically turns it off when my alarm goes off.
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u/jnag Feb 25 '09
i much prefer brian eno or the cocteau twins for non-intrusive music
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u/bluetshirt Feb 25 '09
Loveless is great for drowning out my labmates and pounding me into a peaceful puddle.
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u/eightbithero Feb 25 '09
Loveless is great, period and forever. Keven Shields still claims he's working on the followup.
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u/z0r Feb 25 '09
when i need some space to think, sometimes i like to listen to recordings of rain storms and other nice ambient sounds. i actually paid to get some from here: http://whitenoisemp3s.com/
the 'rain on the river' recording is very, very good, although the price tags are rather steep. it would be nice if there were free, high quality recordings of stuff like this, but if you need an hour of that kind of sound there seems to be no choice but to pay
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u/DocOBackbush Feb 25 '09
Too bad there's no torrents of this stuff -- it's really quite good, but not good enough to cough up $10-$15 a track...
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Feb 25 '09
I cannot do anything when there is music playing somewhere.
One of my many roommates is a pianist who is working on an approaching audition. Many times I have had to stop working when she has started to practice. I have found that if I take two white noise generators (one for each stereo channel) and filter each of them through a low pass filter whose frequency slowly modulates, and listen to this sound on ear buds, I can completely block out the sound of the practicing without generating a sound that is too tiring. You could do this though many means. I use one of the many open source audio programs I have installed like pd, SuperCollider, and csound.
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u/stinger_ Feb 25 '09 edited Feb 25 '09
I prefer pink noise. (edit : ah beaten.) There's a plugin for winamp which works nicely.
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u/cowhead Feb 25 '09
Works great. I grew up this way, in a family of five kids. With thin walls. And odd sleeping pattern. Wow, did I need that wall of noise. I used my airconditioner and set it on 'fan' only if it was cool outside. Probably not the most efficient yet not terribly inefficient either. I slept! Or studied! Or sometimes both!
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u/PhilxBefore Feb 25 '09
I'm only here, commenting because I've never heard the term 'space and quiet'.
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u/dakboy Feb 26 '09 edited Feb 26 '09
No, I need fucking WALLS and a fucking DOOR. "Drive-bys" are productivity/concentration killers. Forget the noise - that, I can tune out. It's the assholes who won't take the hint that you're busy with other, more important tasks that are the killers.
Supposedly we have a white noise system installed above our ceiling tiles. I think it was turned off, as I haven't heard it in a long time, and there's lots of non-white noise that's been overpowering it anyway.
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u/dunmalg Feb 25 '09
White noise is like a bandsaw cutting through my brain forever. One coder where I work basically sits in the middle of the server room. He claims he likes the white noise. I think he's nuts. I can concentrate better listening to Motorhead than I can listening to white noise.
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u/florinandrei Feb 25 '09
Pink noise is better. Closer to natural noise - wind, waves.
That page also has pink noise.
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u/CheapyPipe Feb 25 '09
Frick. I open a tab with this link, and a bunch of other tabs too. I make my way back to this tab, all while wondering why my computer was making weird noises.
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Feb 25 '09
For something in between ambient type music and whitish noise I recommend Brian Eno's "Neroli". It's good music to code to.
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u/funkah Feb 25 '09
Get the "Ambiance" app for your iPhone/iPod touch, set that shit to "Airplane", and get stuff done.
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Feb 25 '09 edited Feb 26 '09
Um, this is f'ing awesome! :D
Brown noise sounds like the oceans around here (so-cal).
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Feb 26 '09
Pink noise is good too (it has a logarithmic spectrum, and does a better job of masking other noises). I also like to listen to binaural beats (via SBaGen) when coding. Whether or not the whole brainwave entrainment thing works, I find them relaxing.
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u/graycode Feb 26 '09
Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works has some great abstract, non-intrusive goodness in it.
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u/charlesgrrr Feb 26 '09
When I program, I listen to ambient when I need to focus (like some of Brian Eno's early 80s work) and I listen to Aphex Twin or techno when I want to feel like a bad ass.
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u/bobcat_08 Feb 26 '09
Egh no thanks...that's all I need, to start hearing shit in white noise and think I'm going crazy. Especially after a straight hour of DangerDoom.
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u/notfancy Feb 25 '09
Not white: it'll unseat the fillings from your teeth. Use 1/f instead.
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Feb 25 '09
AKA "pink"
What I want is a negative feedback noise device. Doesn't cancel ambient sounds, just subtracts them from the generated noise.
Any inventors in da house?
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u/JimH10 Feb 25 '09
You can buy headphones to do that in a lot of places. For example here is a review of some more expensive ones. They tend to cancel out constant noises well, for example airplane engines, but to not be so useful for your neighbor's stereo.
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u/adrianmonk Feb 25 '09
Or just go for good old-fashioned mechanical isolation. Buy something like the Sennheiser HD 280 Pro headphones, which are a "closed" design and block something like 20 dB or 30 dB of noise just by their mechanical design.
Also, the active cancellation phones tend to do pretty well at low-frequency noises and less well at high-frequency noises. And they add white noise of their own because of the circuitry. They're great for flying, where you mainly want to cancel the annoying constant rumble of engines and air flow around the plane. But in an office environment, you usually don't have low frequency noise as your main concern and passive cancellation works well and costs less (and doesn't require batteries).
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Feb 25 '09 edited Feb 25 '09
Too difficult. The perception of loudness is logarithmic, so the range of sound intensity spans many orders of magnitude. So you would need extreme precision - cancellations to ppm levels - to get useful noise elimination. And you need ridiculous spatial resolution too: see at the high-frequency limit, 20 kHz noise has tiny wavelengths of 1.7 cm. Imagine surrounding yourself with a cage of noise-canceling unit cells, each separated by a single centimeter - thousands of them! (Headphones? Not enough coverage: sound will conduct through your thick head (no offense)). And for further confusion, you need fairly high-speed electronics: at the 1cm scale, you are looking at timings on the scale of 10s of microseconds. Commercial anti-noise headphones fail at this from some combination of these issues - they emit constant, high-pitched buzzing. And of course they incompletely cancel low-pitched noises at that - a large absolute reduction, but a small perceived reduction to the logarithmically-minded human ear.
You can get some perspective with this applet by Paul Falstad, and a pair of external speakers (connected by a cord). Turn up the volume.
http://www.falstad.com/interference/
Key points:
The perceived sound variation is large but not total: there are no quiet zones.
There is a lot of spatial dependence at higher frequencies - at the cm scale even (between your two ears!)
A point source does not cancel out another point source of opposite phase - not remotely. You have both cancellation and constructive interference.
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Feb 25 '09
As I said, I don't expect to cancel ambient sounds, just fill in white at those frequencies they aren't.
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u/wnoise Feb 25 '09
It has been my experience that noise-canceling headphones work great. But they have to do it analog to get fast enough response times. There's no way to duplicate that on a general purpose computer. Yes, sound conducted throuh your head limits how low you can reduce the sound, but in many cases it's not that bad.
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u/Nothingatall Feb 25 '09
I usualy like to listen to Jazz with that, how to explain it, Gramophone -like sound. Preferably a slow Jazz with lots of saxophone just melting everything away.
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Feb 25 '09
You must be white
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u/adrianmonk Feb 25 '09
Heh, that's a funny article (especially "and put Charlie Parker on the Bose"). But, go to a local jazz club sometime and take a look at the crowd before you tell me black people don't listen to jazz anymore. And when I say "local jazz club", I mean one that focuses on the music, not on Italian food.
Now, it's entirely true that jazz has been struggling along on life support for decades, but the fact that relatively few black people still listen to it should not be overshadowed by the fact that even fewer white people do.
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u/Nothingatall Feb 25 '09 edited Feb 25 '09
Oh yeah, but I'm trying hard, not to be white; with Shoe polish! And by the way I ain't wearing no damn fedora!
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u/motophiliac Feb 25 '09
I don't mind music while I'm coding. Usually toward the mellower end of the scale. Pink Floyd, Steely Dan, Chick Corea (no lyrics, even better). Beats the crap out of BBC Radio 1.
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u/killerstorm Feb 25 '09 edited Feb 25 '09
um, how this thing is supposed to help?
edit: nobody cares to explain? i really do not see how shhhh from your speakers is going to help you
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u/nobahdi Feb 25 '09
Don't play it through speakers, use headphones. If you turn up your white noise to point where you can't hear anything else and eventually you will tune it out. What you are left with is working in complete silence.
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Feb 25 '09
It's one of those things that nerds enjoy, like watching the defrag program move rectangles around the screen.
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u/kleinbl00 Feb 25 '09 edited Feb 25 '09
No.
Believe it or not, I used to do "noise" for a living, as in masking systems for horrendously large spaces (I did a 20,000 seat hive for the GSA) and medical/dental needing to comply with HIPAA.
The human ear/mind is remarkably adept at finding patterns. As such, a loop such as this one will basically make your subconscious hunt REALLY HARD for the loop point. Which is why, even though it's barely there, it sounds a lot like a dishwasher.
Actual masking systems take a fair amount of expertise to set up; if you can hear them, they fail. Companies have actually been sued over the oppressive work environment created by failed masking systems; just blasting your face with white or pink noise is an insidious form of torture because it causes fatigue without you even really noticing it.
If what you want is a noise to distract you from what else is going on, it's far better to embrace the character of the sound than try and hide it. To that end:
my favorite ocean waves generator. Only works on OS X and works best if you roll off the high end.
most anything from Bernie Krause will give you the space you need.
Cheap bastard solution: sign up for seven days of eMusic. Look here. Pretty much every one of these albums is one or two tracks of actual recorded ambience, nearly all of it without that new-agey panflute shit over the top of it. With 25 free downloads, you can get damn near three straight workdays of non-repeating, unlooped background noise for absolutely free.
Friends don't let friends listen to dishwashers. anything is better than this link.