I often like to have a little background noise while I’m working — sometimes I’ll turn on the TV, even if I’m not paying attention to it, or have the radio on with headphones. It’s paradoxical how our brains work, that total silence can disrupt our concentration. I suspect that part of it is because in a silent room we become more attentive to inevitable rare small sounds.
I have now found the best background sound ever: “10 hours video of Arctic ambience with frozen ocean, ice cracking, snow falling, icebreaker idling and distant howling wind sound. Natural white noise sounds generated by the wind and snow falling, combined with deep low frequencies with delta waves from the powerful icebreaker idling engines”.
Oooh, soothing. Got a nice beat, I think I can get some work done to that.
As I’m getting Affinity going for the day, I have thunderstorms playing, rain, wind, thunder grumbling.
Very nice, this!
Carrying on in the ambient arctic theme, I recommend this album: Sleep Research Facility – Deep Frieze.
I’ve fallen adrift to that one a few times.
I prefer silence. I think that noise would drive me crazy. I know that the white noise of my husband’s CPAP machine bothers me when I’m trying to sleep. Then the sound of the water gurgling through it makes me want to get up to go to the bathroom.
When he’s out of town, I keep the room cold, dark and silent, and I get a good night’s sleep.
Two minutes in and my stomach is not happy.
I find that sort of constant tone lovely, but utterly soporific. I once worked in a factory office with a major air handling unit just a few yards from my window, and the constant low level white noise tended to put me to sleep so I had to ask for a change of office. There are some nice videos on YouTube of idling sounds of the Starship Enterprise (from the Next Generation series) which I use almost every night as a sleep aid. For work I prefer sounds of rain, running water, birdsong, or the croaking and chirping of frogs or night insects (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdKf7rT6kK4).
Funny how we are all different. I cannot stand TV, radio or other such sources of music or sound when I am doing any sort of mental work. I do not require complete silence, just turn off any artificial & unnecessary noise please.
When I really need some background noise, I like putting BBC’s Life into the Blu-Ray player and switching off the music and narration.
Though honestly, listening to Sir David Attenborough is pretty darned relaxing.
That’s really quite lovely. This actually reminds me of ambient duo Windy & Carl’s arctic-inspired music: https://youtu.be/JKbPf1ugtfQ. All of their work is gorgeous and drifting, like music set to brownian motion. I fell asleep listening to their albums for years.
Lately I’ve become enamored of Brian Eno’s Scape ipad app (http://www.generativemusic.com/scape.html). By moving different shapes and patterns around the screen, you can create endless ambient musical atmospheres.
I go with the TNG Enterprise engine noise.
The start was gripping enough, but oh my, the action sequence beginning at 04:35:15 had me on the edge of my seat. And at 07:14:40, I couldn’t believe it, my eyes misted up. Along with the LoTR trilogy and Shoah, this may be the most compelling 10 hours of film ever conceived.
You may want to try some of these (If available),
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Four_Goes_Slow
The Sleigh Ride makes a good background to a festive game of ‘Who can drink the most Babycham before falling sleep while playing Cribbage?’
Or this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xisVS_DKpJg
That’s really quite lovely. This actually reminds me of ambient duo Windy & Carl’s arctic-inspired music: https://youtu.be/JKbPf1ugtfQ. All of their work is gorgeous and drifting, like music set to brownian motion. I fell asleep listening to their albums for years.
Lately I’ve become enamored of Brian Eno’s Scape ipad app. By moving different shapes and patterns around the screen, you can create endless ambient musical atmospheres.
Hi everyone. Sorry to jump off-topic right away, I need some help with something. I’m trying to find an old Pharyngula post, but I cannot remember its title. I was quite young when I first saw it (14 or 15 years old, I guess) and my memories may be distorted, but FWIW this is how I remember it:
Some years ago (maybe 10?) PZ wrote and posted a wonderful blog entry about a set of footprints found in Africa, footprints made many tens of thousands of years ago, maybe hundreds of thousands of years ago, that were apparently of a mother and child walking together across what must have been a muddy plain. Something like that.
In the post, PZ used the YEC’s supposed age of the Earth, which is what, around 6,000 years? — as a unit of time measurement. (Let’s call the unit a “bible”.)
As he walked us backwards in time to meet this mother and child, PZ would periodically stop us at a milestone in the development or history of H. sapiens (or, perhaps, of genus Homo itself) — a nod to “The Ancestor’s Tale”, perhaps — and display a stack of “bibles” showing how many “bibles” backwards in time we’d have to have gone to reach that milestone.
It was a memorable, and beautifully written piece, as I recall, and it illustrated how tiny was that little shoebox of time into which the minds of the YECs had attempted to cram all of Creation. I’d love to find it so I can share it with friends I’ve made in recent years.
Any clues at all will be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
~ Beatrix
Beatrix, that post is here: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/01/31/the-proper-reverence-due-those/
May I present the polar opposite to White Noise Sounds of the Frozen Arctic?
Glen Gould’s The Idea of North. It’s a radio documentary, an exercise in something he called contrapuntal radio. The interviews are edited, cut and spliced so that the overlap thematically and audibly. It’s….interesting. The problem is that Gould could hear all these overlapping voices and make sense of them despite the cacophony. For most everyone else it’s pretty challenging.
erie #13
Thanks for that link.
> Beatrix, that post is here:
Erie, that is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you so much!
The video loops every 11 1/2 seconds. Pick out a snowflake and wait.
José Pacheco I agree I actually prefer this version but it’s all good. The noise actually reminds me of when I was in the navy. I was a submariner and when we were going fast and deep the whole ship vibrated and hummed like this. A lot of times it meant we were making turns for home so it’s a happy memory
https://youtu.be/aRk-DQUUlz8
Not quite in the “good noise” category, but certainly good listening — if perhaps also enraging — is this playlist I ran across a few nights ago, Songs You STILL Should Know (2014): A concert at Tufts University of powerful and still-relevant songs from decades ago, performed by Jeffrey Summit, Paul Lehrman, and others.