Sound bite: What is white noise?

I’m an avid Spotify user, and I like to explore playlists and podcasts for my commute. This white noise playlist by Spotify is a soothing collection to help you focus. There is also this Nature Noise playlist, with a description “where nature and white noise meet”. There is something very calming about hearing waves break on the beach, a repeated rush of water, and the pull of gravity, but I am personally more inclined to listen to instrumentals instead of nature noises. I would much rather be physically in the environment where I’m hearing the sounds of nature, but that’s just a personal preference. So, let’s delve into what white noise is!

White noise is defined as noise produced by combining all the different frequencies of sound together at once. It may sound like the hiss of an untuned FM radio or the background noise on a cassette tape player. White noise masks other annoying sounds as they mediate these disruptions. A short introduction to White Noise can be found below!

Coloured noise refers to any filtered noise, i.e. it is not a pure white noise.  The analogy of using colours to distinguish noise extends from how coloured filters e.g. red pieces of plastic, blue glass, can transform white light into various hues. Similarly, using filters to alter the balance of frequency components changes noise such that it is no longer “white”, but has other qualities (Ellis, 2005).

For example, pink noise refers to noise that sounds more balanced across the full range of audible frequencies, boosting the low range and dampening high-frequency volumes. You can imagine pink noise to sound like the noise inside a flying aircraft. Conversely, blue noise, where energy increases for higher frequencies, sounds like a hiss and has important applications in image and video signals (Ellis, 2005). Brown noise is characterised by an even stronger shift in energy towards the lower spectrum and sounds like rumbling (Ellis, 2005).

Many people play these sounds to help them sleep. They mask the effects of other sounds (SciShow, 2016). Other benefits have also been identified – research on white noise and learning suggests that white noise may improve some cognitive performance in individuals with lower attention. Participants who listened to white noise during a word learning exercise demonstrated better recall accuracy compared to the control group (Angwin et al., 2017)!

This could help with concentration and working on tasks. Maybe it’s time to give that white noise playlist a listen…

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