We’ve all heard of white noise, that static sound the TV makes when poltergeists arrive. There are other colored noise too that mimic natural sounds like rainfall and ocean waves. What they do for us is just now being studied.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What are colorful noises and their uses?
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh Clark, and this is Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's there. She doesn't have a sound associated with her because she's already listening to sound, and this is short stuff.
Chapter 2: Why do people listen to brown noise?
Yeah, we're doing one on the different color noises, you know, white noise, brown noise, pink noise. And Jerry literally just said, hey, I'm listening to brown noise right now, which I've never heard of anyone just listening to noise unless they were trying to sleep or, you know, at a place where they were trying to block out other noise.
But I think Jerry just said it like helped her relax or something or concentrate.
Focus, I think she said.
Yeah. Kind of the same thing I said, but with a different word.
I used to try it, too, during work. It is supposed to help you focus and at the very least drown out other noises. But it just didn't take with me, at least at first, at least for working.
You do like ambient music now, don't you?
Yes. But I get it for sleep, for sure, which is what most people use it for. Jerry's an odd duck.
Yeah, and I have been on record before. I'm a brown nose adherent. Brown noise, I didn't know. Apparently, did Alma say brown nose?
Yeah, I think you did say brown nose.
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Chapter 3: Who was Robert Brown and what is Brownian motion?
And this is Pink's noise.
Brown noise is deeper, has lower frequencies, it's got more bass, minimalizes that higher frequency. And I didn't really know this, but apparently you can liken some of these to sounds in nature. And apparently brown noise is more akin to like a river rapid or a heavy rainfall or thunder sound.
Yes. Distant thunder. Rumbling thunder even. Yeah. Yeah. So obviously that's very alluring. Everybody likes those sounds. So brown noise makes sense. And because there's also white noise and pink noise, you think brown noise is just named after the color brown. Like for some reason, maybe it evoked the color brown in the person who named it. Wrong.
There was a scientist named Robert Brown from Scotland who in the very early 1800s was looking at pollen grains through his microscope and saw them basically dancing around. And he said, this is not possible because pollen is not alive. And he had no idea what this was, but he published his paper so that future generations could solve it.
And apparently no less than Albert Einstein took it on and found this was an excellent demonstration of atomic particles interacting and basically moving ultimately these pollen grains along. the reason that it's named after Robert Brown, Brown Noises, because he tried to figure out how to quantify these random movements, right?
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Chapter 4: How is brown noise created?
Yeah, and this is a part, like, I don't know, this is way above my scientific pay grade, so I'm not sure how you go about this, but he devised this mathematical formula to predict the movements of the pollen and used that to generate an electronic sound, and that was Brown Noise.
Yeah, well, other people who came used his formula to generate sound. I don't understand it either.
Yeah, so the sound of brown noise is literally the formula for the sound of pollen moving, which is just kooky to think about.
It is, but it's pretty cool, too.
It's a good fact of the show, I think.
Yeah, I mean, it's all math, so technically you could use math to translate into other kinds of math, I'm guessing. But just the idea of, yeah... Figuring out how random movements can turn into sound is just, I love that stuff.
Yeah, me too.
Let's talk about this offline, Chuck, while we take a break.
All right.
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Chapter 5: What is white noise and its natural equivalents?
Well, we just had a great conversation about brown noise offline, but now we're going to talk about white noise, the higher cousin to brown noise. Obviously, it does have a range. It's not like it's just high frequency, but it's not as bass heavy. They have the lows in there. They have the The mids and the highs.
But white noise is used, aside from just sleeping a lot of times with like noise-canceling headphones and stuff, masking other sounds. This one is akin naturally to like a light rain or a gentle breeze through the trees. Very nice. Sounds kind of nice too. Mm-hmm.
One of the coolest things I learned ever is that in Kyoto, Japan, there is a the sound of wind blowing through bamboo in this one park is a protected heritage site. Like the sound itself is protected as a world heritage site.
Yeah, I think I remember talking about that game I played, Ghost of Tsushima. I think that's what it's called. It was the sort of feudal Japanese warrior PS4 game that I played. The sounds in that game, it's a gorgeous game, but the sounds of the wind blowing through the poppy fields and through the bamboo forest, you could tell it was a thing that they really wanted to capture, and they did so.
That's cool. I think you're confusing that with Q-Bert.
Yeah. Dying. Dying. All right. What about pink noise?
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Chapter 6: Are there any unique sound heritage sites?
Pink noise is a little different. It's kind of like the compromise between white noise and brown noise because the white noise includes all frequencies. A lot of people are like, I don't like those high frequencies, especially when I'm trying to sleep. But I'm not down with just nothing but the low bass heavy stuff. Give me some mid range.
And maybe accentuate the lower and higher things a little bit, but not too much. And if you do that kind of stuff, you have pink noise.
Yeah. And, you know, I just realized I have my app here. I might as well figure out what pink noise sounds like because I wasn't exactly sure. So we can just play this if that's all right with you. Yeah, go ahead. So that's pink. Yeah. That's white. Yeah, it could be pink. I mean, that does sound like ocean waves. That's brown. Okay.
But my app has a bunch of other colors, and I'm not sure if this is like, hey, let's just go crazy, but there's also purple noise, blue noise. Which app? Are you talking about Dwellspring? No, no, no. This is a different one. But, yeah, our friend actually developed a white noise app, right?
Yeah, it's called Dwellspring. The guy who created our website, Brandon Reed, friend of the show and just friend in general, and also one-time world record holder, Guinness record holder of the 400-meter piggyback. Man, what a dude. Yeah, he created just a world-class sound generator app. And in addition to all the different colored noises, he also has things like a box fan.
The airplane cabin sound.
That's the one I use on my app. But I forgot Brandon had his. I'm going to switch over just to support.
Yeah, it's really great. I mean, like, it's a really good app. The one that got me was crackling fireplace in a thunderstorm.
Oh, buddy. That is niche. Yeah, exactly. So that just put me to sleep thinking about it.
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