Unshielded speakers can act as AM radio receivers. I've had old speakers play extremely faint music while not plugged into anything; a few minutes later it identified itself as the local radio station.
Many AM radio stations are permitted to crank up their transmit power at night, exactly when many people might use white noise to sleep.
I feel like it's important to note here that something like 1 in 100 people hears voices without schizophrenia, it's kinda quite common. I'm one of them. Paragraphs like this don't help with people's perception of this phenomenon though.
That goes to show how variable the human condition is. I had an MRI a while back for an unrelated issue and the doc found that I have a Chiari malformation in my spine near my brain stem. I’ve never had any symptoms from it whatsoever. Before MRIs were common, it was expected that a change the size of mine would cause problems, because when people with symptoms got surgery to fix them, that’s the size range the doctors found. Turns out there are a lot of people up and about with those same measurements who’d never know unless it turned up on a test like mine did. Go figure.
> Any app or machine you listen to that produces a color of noise, like white, brown, pink, green, or otherwise, is based on an algorithm or a code.
Well, brief aside: Brown noise isn’t a ‘color’ of noise - or if it were, it would be red. It’s just named after Robert Brown, the motion guy.
> It’s not truly random—so you’ll get a little while of what seems like random noise, and then the sounds repeat.
This is a complete misunderstanding of how pareidolia works. You’re not picking up on pseudorandomness or actual repetitions that are really hidden in the noise - you’re making up patterns out of the randomness itself.
Same thing that a diffusion-based image generator does when it squints really hard to find the picture of an astronaut riding a horse hidden in a noise field, by amplifying the bits that look most astronauty or horsey.
But sounds - on queue I can "pull up" a song and play it in my head - full orchestra, guitars, etc. I'm not very musically talented by my brain certainly runs on sound vs vision.
When I'm in the shower sometimes (like this) I'll hear something like a shout or a voice - it occasionally happens randomly too in other situations - but I certainly don't think it's some discarnate spirit - there is usually something else to accompany it and I assume it's my brain filling in the rest.
Also.
> on queue I can "pull up" a song and play it in my head
But I also do not have that. Starting to feel a bit short-changed here.
The "voice" in the noise is unintelligible, so I figure I'm safe until it starts to tell me to do things I should not.
>https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect
>They may see colored images of pieces falling into place on an invisible layout at the edges of their visual fields or when they close their eyes
Interesting, I work as an agronomist and get this if I’ve been scouting for some problem that requires special focus to find, like cutworms, for prolonged periods of time. I’ll get faint images of them when I close my eyes.
Not disturbing in the slightest, I just knew I’d been hard at it.
Hypnagogic hallucinations are common. They're most intense for me when I'm falling asleep in a very quiet room. You don't need a source of noise for this.
Whenever I’m tired - which is practically every night these days (8 month old baby) - I end up hearing distant music from the air purifier
I find it rather soothing.
I still hear faint music in the white noise sometimes, as recently as last night.
For me it's usually something like a full orchestra. I assume that is because our brains are already trained on the erratic arrangements and multitude of different sounds of a real orchestra - it pattern matches the noise better than say smooth jazz.
Of course, I'm a lifelong gamer, so I think that reinforces the idea that it's something your brain is trying to interpret--and hence it's shaped by things familiar to my brain. My wife heard something similar on a different night and described it as something else. But we were both in agreement that it definitely went away as soon as I turned off the fan.
I find it rather interesting when it happens, actually. It's my brain subconsciously doing creative musical improv--which I am far too inept to do consciously. I wish I could remember the melodies long enough in the morning to try my hand at transcribing them.
Many white noise machines are actually looping a 5 second recording of white noise. This is hard to notice at first, but it leads to the pattern recognition in the article.
I've found that this phenomenon is much less pronounced with white noise machines that generate actual random nosie.
And soon I heard it again, and again, and again. I knew the audio looped, but having detected a distinguishing sound like that plop broke the illusion for me completely, I was no longer listening to the calm waters of a lake, but a looping wav file.
After a while of listening to it with headphones on, you'll start hearing different words phase in and out.
Pretty wild.
One thing I'd notice -- it was way, way worse if I was severely sleep deprived (which is not often anymore).
Sometimes drugs trigger it. I was on a medication for a week that made my washroom fan seem to emit choir music. It was quite entertaining.
I've never heard a voice in any of them.
This might be a personal problem.
Cmd+f found no mention of AM radio in there, which is another possible explanation for hearing voices or music in those machines. If I were hearing that, I wouldn't appreciate this article telling me it's in my head.
