Have you ever been on a bus, a subway, a plane, or in a hotel, and you just want some peace and quiet, but the ambient noise makes it impossible? A dripping tap, a snoring roommate, annoying conversations, children screaming. Almost any soundscape can be perceived as more or less bothersome by different people. Unfortunately, conventional noise-dampening devices only offer limited help, because the human ear is extremely sensitive to quiet sounds. For louder sounds, however, sensitivity decreases drastically. In other words, no matter what you put in your ears, you’ll still hear something, and that can be very disruptive. While there are now noise-canceling earbuds that can further reduce sound, they usually don’t eliminate the disturbance completely. Unfortunately, I’m one of those people whose threshold for noise is very low. That’s why I’ve been thinking about how to solve the problem relatively easily and completely eliminate disturbing noises. A word of warning right away: Hearing plays a crucial protective role, warning us of impending dangers. Using a method to completely block out ambient noise can have serious consequences. Such methods should only be used when you are absolutely certain that nothing can happen if you can’t hear anything! Unfortunately, there’s always a residual risk. Therefore, the method I’m describing should only be used in an absolute emergency! Be warned! After finding brown noise to be the best way to suppress background noise, I discovered that my solution already existed, and there are even smartphone apps that offer the desired function.
Here’s how:
- Download the brown_noise file to your smartphone or MP3 player. Alternatively, you can use a noise app. I recommend “Easy Noise” because it doesn’t collect or share any data and is completely ad-free. The app is available on F-Droid (https://f-droid.org) and its source code is also available.
- Connect your headphones to the player, put them on, and play the sound file or start the app.
- Adjust the volume of the brown noise so that the background noise is masked by the noise. It’s important to keep the volume as low as possible to avoid hearing damage. This method works even better in combination with noise-canceling headphones.
- Ignore the noise. After a short time, it will usually no longer be perceived as bothersome, and the desired peace and quiet will return.
Why does this work?
Uniform, diffuse noises like white noise are suppressed by the brain after a short time and are not perceived as disturbing. White noise consists of sounds of virtually all audible frequencies. Because the noise from headphones makes it relatively quiet when it reaches the inner ear, and the white noise is relatively loud, the noise is completely lost in the white noise. This means that the ear becomes virtually deaf to sounds outside the inner ear.
Why brown noise and not white noise?
For your information: White noise contains all frequencies at nearly equal volume. With brown noise, the lower frequencies are louder than the higher ones.
Higher frequencies are attenuated much more than lower frequencies by barriers between the environment and the ear. Headphones already absorb most of the high frequencies. Using white noise would unnecessarily suppress frequencies that don’t even reach the ear. Furthermore, brown noise is generally perceived as more pleasant.