#DARK NOISE APP HOW TO#

A musician with an advanced engineering degree, he recorded and analyzed the sounds, then played them back upon his return home, where he discovered that the ocean and its crashing waves seamlessly masked the whoosh of the cars. For instance, ASTI, maker of the Sound+Sleep and the LectroFan, was born when its founder noticed while on a trip to the beach that the sound of the ocean reminded him of the freeway noises outside his home (but more relaxing). But they may also mask offending noises, if they're similar enough. If you happen to find these sounds soothing, they might help you sleep or focus. Some white noise machines, such as the Sound+Sleep, also offer real-world sounds like that of rain, river, and ocean waves. However, if you have the sort of tinnitus that sounds like ringing in your ears, the steady, higher-frequency sound of white or blue noise may offer relief. That’s inefficient and unkind to your ears. In contrast, white noise, whose sound graph is a straight, horizontal line, won’t block the high-intensity low frequencies of a garbage truck until you ramp up the volume.

For instance, the rumble of garbage trucks, the sound graph for which looks like a downward slope (as long as the X axis is linear), is handily masked by brown noise even at a relatively low volume, because brown noise is characterized by a lot of low frequencies and a similar downward-sloping sound graph. But a smarter way to mask noise is to choose the color with higher intensity in the frequencies matching that of the noise you’re trying to block, explained sound engineer Stéphane Pigeon. The white, pink, and brown noises you tend to find in sound generators can all mask annoying sounds to varying degrees, if you turn the volume up enough. To understand how noises mask each other, we spent hours talking on the phone and emailing with Stéphane Pigeon, PhD, a sound engineer specializing in white noise and the creator of myNoise, our favorite white noise app. (ASTI), the maker of two of our picks, the LectroFan EVO and the Sound+Sleep.

#DARK NOISE APP HOW TO#

We also interviewed UPenn scientist Mathias Basner, MD, PhD, a professor of sleep and chronobiology in the department of psychiatry who co-authored a clinical review of studies on the use of white noise as a sleep aid, as well as Stanford University sleep researcher Rafael Pelayo, MD, author of How to Sleep: The New Science-Based Solutions for Sleeping Through the Night and a medical consultant to Adaptive Sound Technologies Inc. To learn what features to look for in white noise machines, we spoke with Michael Perlis, PhD, director of the behavioral sleep medicine program at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine whose work includes studying the use of white noise machines in treating insomnia.

Dark noise app