Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Colorful Noises

Episode Date: April 9, 2025

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.

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["The Short Stuff"] Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh Clark, and this is Charles W. Chuck Bright, 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. 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. What did she say? 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. I get it for- 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., I'm a brown nose adherent. Brown noise, didn't know apparently, did I almost say brown nose? Yeah, I think you did say brown nose.

It can also be called red nose, or red noise, which I didn't know, but brown noise, as I've demonstrated on the show, if this is white noise, this is brown noise. And this is pink noise. W 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. 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. And the reason that it's named after Robert Brown, Brown Noise, is because he tried to figure out how to quantify these random movements, right?

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. I just think-

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. Well, we just had a great conversation about brown noise.

It was wonderful. 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.

It sounds kind of nice too. 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. Yeah, and 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. That 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 Qbert. Yeah. Yeah. Dang, dang. All right, what about pink noise? 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, I could've guessed. 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'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 gonna switch over just to support Brandon. 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, yeah. That just put me to sleep thinking about it. Go check out Dwellspring, it really is a good app.

And I think it's everywhere you can get apps. I'm sure it is. Nice work, Brandon. So, back to the noises, like, as far as which it is. Nice work, Brandon. So back to the noises, like as far as which one is best for sleep, there have been some very middling studies over the years. We'll mention a few of them,

but the problem with these is, in 2017, they were like, hey, let's get eight people in here and watch them sleep. Or the one in 2016, they got 16 people. This is just never a lot of folks, you know? I guess, you know, bed space is probably not the easiest thing to do unless people are doing this at home. But at Oxford in 2017, they got those eight people,

and they said that they fell asleep 40% faster listening to white noise, but their overall sleep was about the same. Okay, but still, falling asleep, not being able to fall asleep is a part of insomnia Not being able to get back to sleep is another part of it, too. So yeah, I mean I would I would say that's great a year before somebody decided that they wanted to see how

How much better you could recall vocabulary words if you slept using pink noise? could recall vocabulary words if you slept using pink noise. Yeah. And I guess they found that 16 young adults who slept with pink noise had slightly improved recollection of vocabulary words. So they were like, and pickle. Whereas the other, the control group couldn't ever remember pickle.

They were like, the green thing that was a cucumber one. They're like, man, I should have slept with pink noise. There was a study in 2017 from Northwestern of 13 older adults, and they said pink noise provided deeper sleep overall and improved, again, ability to recall words. And again, that word was pickle. That's right.

There was a study in Iran, and this is probably the most robust of all of them, they looked at 60 elderly coronary patients. And they said half of you are gonna sleep with white noise, the other half are not going to have white noise, but all of you are in a hospital. And if you've ever tried to sleep in a hospital, it should be illegal, the sounds that they have, because your sleep just deteriorates

the longer you're in the hospital. It's awful. Yumi took care of a brother when he was in the hospital for like three weeks. She would stay there overnight. It's tough. She would, in addition to just all the bings and the beeps and all that stuff,

the nurses come in and they're just like, hey, how's it going? It's time for your blood pressure. And it's three in the morning. in and they're just like, hey, how's it going? It's time for your blood pressure. Like, and it's three in the morning. And that happens every, like, you know, there's something that wakes you up every 20 minutes. And it's just so nuts that hospitals are just so aloof about that when we all know how important sleep is.

And then that and then nutrition in hospitals is abysmal as well. I should say American hospitals. Yeah. I just wanted to go off on that because it is something that should be fixed and remedied. No, it's tough if you've ever had to be at a hospital for a long time supporting somebody

or just being the patient. It is hard to sleep, the beds are not great, and they're always throwing on those fluorescent lights right when you're dozing off. It'd be like going to get your tires changed at Sears and they keep tacks all over the floor. You know? Like they're trying to, they're just sabotaging themselves

and doing what they're supposed to be doing, which is healing. Yeah, that's a good point. And we should say the results of the study in the control group, they found the quality of sleep degraded as they obviously spent multiple nights there with all those beeps and, you know, let me check your blood pressure's happening.

Once they had, the ones who had the white noise, their quality of sleep remained basically the same throughout their stay, so it did not degrade over time. Yeah, not bad. Which is great. Yeah, for sure. I mean, they just put a white noise generator in every single room, or give every patient dwell spring.

Yeah, exactly. Or there's that app, there's other apps, there are standalone sound machines that you can get. This is just a little thing that you put beside your bed, or maybe Jerry has beside her desk at work so she can sleep on the job. And then as far as like how to use it, like that's up to you.

Depending on what noise does best for you, try different ones out. The volume, try some different ones out. I find that I get my very best sort of put me to sleep stuff when I run it through an actual speaker instead of just through my phone speaker, because you get some more deep bass resonance. Oh yeah.

And my napping trick is I will put a pillow over my head and face and stick that phone under there with me, and it creates this sort of echo-y, not echo-y, but like a, just sort of a, it traps the sound. It's like a cavern of sound, and that really gets me out. That and three shots of rum. Yeah, you know, the afternoon rum.

You got anything else, man? I got nothing else. I think that was very nice of you. You gave some great advice to people who have trouble sleeping, which my heart goes out to. Hey, thanks. People like that for sure. Yeah.

Yeah, I guess I mean short stuff is out. ["I Heart Rated"] Yeah. Yeah, I guess I mean short stuff is out.