For more elaborate noise generators (I think it also has a brown noise generator hidden somewhere) you can always go to https://mynoise.net/ - I used to use that site a lot when I was still working from the office, and since my company now also has a "return to office" policy, I guess I will be using it more again in the future...
Linuxbrew is pretty convenient for installing dependencies, especially on "stable" distributions like Debian/Ubuntu. You can install specific versions of dependencies that you want, even keep them side-by-side.
It's also distro-agnostic, so it works almost everywhere.
Looks interesting. It both says that installing without sudo is a feature, which sounds neat, and that installing into ~/.linuxbrew is an unsupported feature.
# On Linux, it installs to /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew if you have sudo access
# and ~/.linuxbrew (which is unsupported) if run interactively.
HOMEBREW_PREFIX_DEFAULT="/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew"
HOMEBREW_CACHE="${HOME}/.cache/Homebrew"
That site gives off strong "small web" vibes (good thing), and is clearly a product of passion (or at least, a product of competence in the field of sound/signal processing). My donation to get access to the full range of generators was worth every penny.
I discovered mynoise.net some years ago. As I lived near a church where the bells would be active every 15 minutes... It really helped to not listen to them.
The downside: the alarm clock was also less audible in the morning! :D
I'm surprised there's any churches left still doing that frequency. Is it a touristy thing or something? Definitely would have thought most at this point are down to hourly or even just once at noon, with an awful lot more silent but for special occasions like weddings.
It seems to be pretty common in Washington, DC. Offhand, I can think of St. John's Episcopal at 16th & H Sts. NW, St. Matthew's [Catholic] Cathedral on the 1700 block of Rhode Island Avenue NW. I think that the First Presbyterian Church at 16th & Kennedy NW does. All this is from just my regular commuting or running routes, so I suspect one can find quite a few more examples.
I have this problem that when I know that the such ambient noise is synthesised in any way, then my brain simply rejects it as if I knew it is a placebo so it no longer works.
Similarly if I listed authentic recorded ambient noise, once I recognise a loop point, it becomes extremely annoying.
That's why I can't use tools like mynoise.net.
I had a couple of solid 8 hour recordings from a cafe or office, but after a couple of listens I kind of learned it is a recording and they no longer work. Basically rather than focusing on doing work etc. my brain is listening for faint phrases, whether I heard it before etc.
The workaround I found is that I just have a window open so I can hear street noises, but this is going to be troublesome during the winter.
I am planning to start making recordings so maybe if I have a solid month worth of ambient noise, I will be able to trick myself it is not a repeat if it takes a month for a full rotation.
I can hear Shepard tones [1] in songs now. I remember the first time I heard it in a song, I was blown away, confused as to what I was hearing.
Later when it was pointed out to me that is is "a thing" I started to recognize them in other songs. I sort of miss being naive.
There's a line from one of Feynman's books where he is arguing with an artist friend who dislikes how Feynman (science generally) dissect a rose rather than just admiring its beauty. Feynman is incredulous as to how knowing more about a thing can take away from its beauty. (I may be slightly mis-remembering this exchange.)
That always bothered me because I felt that naïveté is a thing you lose with knowledge and that is not always a good thing.
Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer" [2] instead resonated with me.
Shepard tone is popular for building suspense. The soundtrack for the movie "Dunkirk" leverages a pretty identfiable shepard tone for anyone interested in hearing a quick example.
Your case sounds a bit extreme (perhaps it has an element of nocebo through overthinking it?), but I do share this problem to an extent.
If you like ambient music, I love Brian Eno’s ‘Reflection’ album and use it for a similar purpose as noise. But I eventually got sick of hearing it again and again, recognising the same bits... Then I found he has also released the original endless generator (from which the album is just an hour-long recording) as an iOS app. It’s wonderful. It’s just endless Reflection, never repeating, always sounding new, but always sounding like Reflection. Expensive but worth it, if you liked the hour-long recording.
If street noise worked for me I'd mount a weatherproof microphone outside the window, run a cable from it inside (maybe around the edge of the window) to a preamp driving a cheap Class D power amp, and drive one good speaker with it. Maybe put a graphic EQ in the chain after the preamp if I wanted to fiddle with the sound.
Winter problem solved. No bluetooth or batteries needed; just a wall wart or maybe USB-C.
Running the cable would be the trickiest part if I had close tolerance metal window frames. In that case maybe a bluetooth mic would be best, but I'd have to figure out how to weatherproof it.
I used this enough that years ago I paid them money just because I got so much use out of it. Haven't used it in a few years though, as lately I've been listening to more music than noise.
It's pretty extreme to insinuate that users are bots with no evidence. I checked both users' accounts and find it incredibly unlikely that either is a bot.
shmerl, the user who mentioned mynoise in that link, has 11,234 karma and has had their account since 2011. rob74, the user you're responding to, has 5,923 karma and has had their account since 2016. Both are recently-active users with a history of real comments that don't mention mynoise.
Perhaps you are seeing this site mentioned frequently because users enjoy it and it fills its niche incredibly well. I previously came across it searching for a Shepherd tone generator and have found that it offers the best balance between tweakability and ease-of-use.
