How To Improve Focus With An Audio Cocktail
White, Pink, And Brown Noise
Can't focus? Here's how to make a perfect audio cocktail out of background noise.
Some people focus best in a chaotic environment, like a coffeehouse. Other people need absolute quiet, such as in a library. But sometimes you don't have an option.
And even people who usually prefer chaos might need more quiet when reading and studying. When noise-cancelling headphones aren't enough, we'll show you how to create an audio concoction that drowns out everything.
White noise has its name because it's the combination of all noise, just like how the color white is the combination of all colors. Of course, it's impossible to combine all sounds, but when enough sounds combine, they blend together to become white noise.
If you're in a group of two or three people, you can hear what individuals are saying. But if you're in a group of 1,000 people, it's much harder to tune in to a single individual. The background drone of a large number of people is white noise.
White noise is also the sound of static. It's the sound TVs used to make when there was no reception. As it turns out, white noise has been found to help tune out other noises and help with focus.
However, some people find the higher-pitched sound of most white noise generators annoying. They might thus prefer deeper or mid-range tones. For those people, there's brown and pink noise. Pink noise is more mid-range, while brown noise is deeper.
The color doesn't affect focus, though. It's only a matter of preference. Below are some of the ways to focus with an audio cocktail
1. Adding Noise To Your Cocktail
The first element in our cocktail is a noise generator. The best one is the White Noise Generator by mynoise.net.
It allows you to fine-tune the white noise to your exact tastes, featuring a large variety of presets that let you choose noise by tone or color.
The service also gives you the ability to animate the frequency of the noise. You can choose from a number of animation settings for example, it lets you make the animations more or less subtle. And you can change the animation speed.
It even has timed bells for meditation and the ability to automatically shut down after a certain time, if you're using it for sleep.
A white noise generator can be enough to get you started. But if you're somewhere noisy, it may not be enough. You can also use sound to take yourself somewhere else.
2. Get Somewhere Peaceful With An Audio Soundscape
Imagine working by a babbling brook in a forest full of bird songs and the sounds of the wind as it rustles through the trees. Or maybe you'd prefer working in a busy spaceport with the rumble of ships taking off and landing in the distance.
Perhaps you'd rather be at a beach with the soothing roar of waves rolling in and out.
There are a few great apps that play multiple sounds to create soundscapes like that. They're customizable, so you can tailor them to your exact mood.
3. Noises Online
The first such service is Noises Online. It's a simple tool with near-infinite variety. There are a large selection of nature sounds, such as thunder, waterfalls, and birds. And it has a collection of white noise-type sounds, like a busy coffeehouse, a campfire, and fan noise.
It also features straight brown, pink, and white noise if you prefer something more straightforward.
Each sound in Noises Online offers individual volume adjustment, and you can adjust the overall tone to suit your ears. Once you find a favorite setting or mix, you can save and share it with friends.
4. Ambient Mixer
If Noises Online doesn't provide enough options for you, there's also Ambient Mixer, with a truly limitless variety of soundscapes. Ambient Mixer is a socially powered soundscape generator, offering a massive collection of mixes created by the community.
Each mix consists of eight tracks played at different intervals. The service lets you adjust the individual tracks by volume and frequency, as well as choosing whether to play tracks from the left or right speaker to make the sounds more immersive.
If the hundreds of sessions in dozens of categories aren't enough for you, you can also make your own.
5. My Noise
The makers of the white noise generator mentioned above, myNoise, also have a massive selection of other offerings. They all use the same system of sliders as the white noise generator, but adjust the sounds being played instead.
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