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Decoder Ring | The White Noise Boom
00:54:58
There’s more white noise available than any one person could possibly need. And yet, more keeps coming.
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- [00:00]
Willa Paskin
If you went on a road trip and you didn't stop for a Big Mac or drop a crispy fry between the car seats or use your McDonald's bag as a placemat, then that wasn't a road trip. It was just a really long drive.
- [00:12]
Dr. Stephane Pigeon
Ba da ba ba ba at participating McDonald's.
- [00:15]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [00:37]
Brandon Reed
Of $45 for a three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of networks busy taxes and fees extra see mintmobile.com.
- [00:50]
Willa Paskin
Elon Uhlendorf has three children. His youngest is brand new and his eldest is not quite five. And from the very beginning of his time as a parent, he, he and his partner found themselves struggling with an age old problem getting their kid to sleep.
- [01:06]
Elon Uhlendorf
There were some really profound, absurd moments of desperation, like really absurd. In order to get our baby to sleep, one of us had to hold both of her arms down and the other one had to shake a shaker in front of her face for like 10 minutes. And we were like, what are we even doing here?
- [01:25]
Willa Paskin
It had all started in the very first weeks after his daughter was born.
- [01:29]
Elon Uhlendorf
Any baby's sleep feels bad at the beginning. So you're just in this like desperate sleep haze all the time and you'll do anything in your power to get a little bit more sleep.
- [01:41]
Willa Paskin
Elon's instinct is to turn to technology to creatively solve problems he writes, teaches and designs, with a particular focus on subverting dominant web algorithms and using them unusually. But now, faced with this new problem, his sleep deprived mind drifted towards a pretty common solution.
- [01:59]
Elon Uhlendorf
We turned to white noise.
- [02:07]
Willa Paskin
White noise has a very precise technical definition, but people also use the term loosely to describe all sorts of washes of sound, other synthetic hums pitched differently, or natural sounds like a rainstorm or crashing waves. These sounds can mask other sounds, which is why they have become a widespread baby sleeping hack. When you put one on, a baby won't be disturbed by street sounds, and parents won't be disturbed by every little sniffle and scuffle and change in breathing a baby might make. So in their sleepy desperation, Elon and his partner called upon it.
- [02:46]
Elon Uhlendorf
We would just yell at Google phone from our bed, like, hey, Google, play Baby White Noise on Spotify. And this is the track that it would play.
- [03:03]
Willa Paskin
It seemed to do the trick. Soon they were asking Google to play Baby White Noise for them all the time. It didn't really sink in just how much until Elon opened up his Spotify wrapped at the end of the year.
- [03:16]
Elon Uhlendorf
My number one song for the year was called Shh. Peaceful Shushing, Mother's voice parentheses Loopable by the artist Baby Shushing featuring Baby Sleep.
- [03:27]
Willa Paskin
But after a while, the power of Shh. Peaceful Shushing, Mother's Voice Loopable started to fade.
- [03:35]
Elon Uhlendorf
We would find that our baby would start waking up, like 10 minutes after we put her down.
- [03:40]
Willa Paskin
They discovered that to make it work again, they needed to add. Add in their own voices, layering their own shushing sounds on top of what Google was playing.
- [03:51]
Elon Uhlendorf
We were like an absurd avant garde choir performing with the speaker lulling our baby to sleep. But you can't really shush while sleeping.
- [04:01]
Willa Paskin
So to get some sleep himself, Elon decided to make his own recording. One that would combine the sound of his own voice shushing and the sound of a heartbeat. Because babies are supposed to like that, all layered on top of a background white noise track, which he now had to find. Up to this point, Elon had been listening to whatever his voice assistant played when they called to it from bed. Now he was actually looking at what white noise was available on Spotify, and he was flabbergasted. Twice over.
- [04:35]
Elon Uhlendorf
It's both how many options there are and how little I can tell the difference between those options.
- [04:41]
Willa Paskin
Spotify, to say nothing of YouTube in the app store, contains hundreds of thousands of sound masking tracks. Tracks billed for sleep and for concentration, for stress and for comfort. And they're not just white noise. There's pink noise and brown noise too. There's thunder and rain, crickets and frogs. There are sounds to mask tinnitus and snoring and noises meant to replicate tinnitus and snoring. There's six hours of bacon frying and knife sharpening and cell phones vibrating. And even a guy who will drone you to sleep by talking nonsense.
- [05:19]
Mack Haygood
The facts I have done that any more Right thing. You shall be so good to find the tears of her husband, Ms. Summerson, and has called home to the police.
- [05:29]
Willa Paskin
But it's not just the variety that struck Elon. It's also the repetition.
- [05:34]
Elon Uhlendorf
Like what seemed to be the exact same idea over and over and over again.
- [05:39]
Willa Paskin
The only discernible difference between many of these tracks is whether the white noise goes on for 3, 6, 8, or 12 hours. How do you distinguish between a track called 10 hours of oscillating fan for sleep and one called 10 hour oscillating fan? Parentheses no distractions or between white noise, Ocean Waves and natural white noise, Ocean waves or heavy thunder, Loud thunder and epic thunder. When Elon saw all of this, he felt cynical.
- [06:17]
Elon Uhlendorf
What a wasteful use of so many people's time to make essentially the same thing.
- [06:24]
Willa Paskin
But is it? This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. 20 years ago, if you told someone white noise was a regular part of your life, they would have found that unusual. Nowadays, it's likely they use it themselves or know someone who does. The global white noise business is valued at $1.31 billion. TikTok is full of people trumpeting its powers, and Spotify users alone listen to 33 million hours of it daily. Far more of these sounds already exist than any one person could need or use, and yet more keep coming. Looking out at this uncanny ocean of noises, we wanted to see if it was possible to put a human face on it, to understand why there is so much of it and what motivates the people trying to soothe our desperate ears with sounds you're not really supposed to hear. So today on Decoder Ring, who makes the sound of quiet? With summer in full swing, do you ever feel the urge to refresh your closet but not waste money on pieces you'll only wear for one season? For timeless, elevated classics that feel luxurious, check out Quints. I have a really great sleeveless dress from them that, as promised, feels kind of elevated and luxurious, but was also affordable. You can dress it up or down. It's substantial, but it stays nice and cool. By working directly with top artisans and cutting out the middlemen, Quince gives you luxury without the markup. Think 100% European linen top starting at $30. Washable silk dresses and skirts and soft cotton sweaters. Versatile warm weather pieces you'll reach for again and again. Give your summer closet an upgrade with quince. Go to quince.comdecoder for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q U I N C E.com decoder to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com decoder this podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You choose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice Progressive loves to help people make smart choices. That's why they offer a tool called Auto Quote Explorer that allows you to compare your Progressive car insurance quotes with rates from other companies so you save time on the research and can enjoy savings when you choose the best rate for you. Give it a try after this episode@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. It's not just the white noise tracks on Spotify that seem indistinguishable. It's. It's whoever or whatever made them. If you take a look at the various shushing options, they are attributed to artists with names like White Noise, Baby Sleeping and White Noise Baby Sleep and White Noise for Baby Sleep. Certainly some of the entities and people behind these names are churning out slop. They don't care a lot about sound, but Dr. Stephane Pijon does.
- [10:17]
Dr. Stephane Pigeon
I want to provide beautiful noises because noise can be beautiful.
- [10:23]
Willa Paskin
Stephane has tracks on Spotify under the artist name mynoise. Mynoise.net is also the name of his website. It's one of the oldest, most robust and comprehensive white noise sites on the Internet. It contains hundreds of sounds, dozens of different kinds of rain, as well as study beats and whimsical noises like the soundscapes of medieval villages and mermaids.
- [10:51]
Dr. Stephane Pigeon
The mermaids were really difficult to record. Yes, yes. It's a mixture between female vocals and ocean sounds.
- [11:02]
Willa Paskin
Stefan's passion for noise was born back when he was a teenager in Belgium and years deep into piano lessons.
- [11:09]
Mack Haygood
He.
- [11:09]
Willa Paskin
He got a new instrument.
- [11:11]
Dr. Stephane Pigeon
I felt in love with the first synthesizer I got, and there I found something. It's the passion for the sound itself, not the music that I played on the piano, but really being able to craft the sound with filters, with oscillators. I said, okay, that's so cool. I need to find ways to work in that field.
- [11:37]
Willa Paskin
He went on to become a sound engineer with a PhD in signal processing. He worked at the Belgian military academy, teaching officers how to transmit audio data in the field. And he also worked as a sound designer for Roland, the very musical instrument company behind the synthesizer he'd first fallen in love with.
- [11:55]
Dr. Stephane Pigeon
So, as you see, I always try to devote time to my passion, and.
- [12:00]
Willa Paskin
It'S his passion for sound that led him into the world of white noise.
- [12:04]
Dr. Stephane Pigeon
It was so natural. As an engineer, I've been born with white noise all around me.
- [12:10]
Willa Paskin
But what is white noise, technically speaking?
- [12:14]
Dr. Stephane Pigeon
First we have to ask ourselves what noise is. And to me, noise is the sound of chaos.
- [12:22]
Willa Paskin
Within that chaos are a few key ingredients.
- [12:26]
Dr. Stephane Pigeon
You need density. I mean a lot of sounds happening together and randomness.
- [12:33]
Willa Paskin
Stefan offered us a thought experiment to illustrate what he means. Imagine you're listening to two people playing ping pong in a room.
- [12:43]
Dr. Stephane Pigeon
As you can hear, there is a kind of randomness, but here we are definitely lacking the density. So let's now introduce more people playing ping pong in the same room. Definitely it's more chaotic, but it's not noise yet. So let's increase the number of people in the room. This is the sound. With ten people, hundred people, that starts to be interesting. Thousands and 10,000.
- [13:21]
Willa Paskin
Now you have the randomness and the density you need for a properly chaotic sonic wash. You have noise. But white noise specifically has one more special property that has to do with frequency.
- [13:37]
Dr. Stephane Pigeon
White noise is a signal that includes all the frequencies in equal intensity that humans are able to hear.
- [13:47]
Willa Paskin
The name white noise is a riff on the term white light. White light is all the wavelengths the eye can see. So white noise is all the frequencies the ear can hear from around 20 Hz on the low end all the way up to 20,000 Hz, and all the frequencies in between, all played at the same intensity. Frequency is also where the other colors of noise come in. You might have heard of these, and certainly if you search for noise, you'll see them. One is pink noise. That's what you get when you take white noise and turn down the high frequencies. Emphasize the low frequencies even more and you get brown noise. Regular people often use the term white noise pretty loosely to define any of these soothing background sounds and more besides. But for a sound engineer like Stephane, white noise is distinct because it's so much more useful.
- [14:43]
Dr. Stephane Pigeon
And that was my everyday and my most loved signal.
- [14:48]
Willa Paskin
Stephane appreciated white noise because it's so handy for measurement, for checking if, say, a speaker is producing all its bass notes and its trebly ones too.
- [14:57]
Dr. Stephane Pigeon
So you just need to feed white noise to a device and listen to the output, because that's a signal that has all the frequencies inside at once.
- [15:08]
Willa Paskin
That same property is also the reason so many people use white noise to mask unwanted sounds. You can only mask a sound with another sound of the same form, frequency. Since white noise has all the frequencies, it can mask everything from crying babies to traffic to your neighbor's party. But Stephane had never dreamed of using it the way many people now do in the background for concentration and comfort.
- [15:36]
Dr. Stephane Pigeon
Oh, no, I was not listening to white noise. It's torture. It's much too bright.
- [15:43]
Willa Paskin
Stephane finds white noise to be unbearably shrill. In fact, for many Years, he couldn't imagine putting on any kind of noise at all to help him focus.
- [15:52]
Dr. Stephane Pigeon
I much prefer to work in silence.
- [15:56]
Willa Paskin
But that was not the case for the other noisemaker we spoke to.
- [16:00]
Brandon Reed
I do not like silence. My wife is always like, can we just enjoy like 30 seconds of silence in the car? I'm like, no noise. Always something.
- [16:07]
Willa Paskin
Brandon Reed is the founder of dwellspring, a company and app that today distributes hundreds of different sounds. And he came to Noyes not as an engineer, but as a listener.
- [16:17]
Brandon Reed
And in fact, actually, we can cut this out, but. Alexa, stop. Sorry. I have brown noise, like, playing all day, and it's probably just cranking in the back.
- [16:25]
Willa Paskin
Brandon's been using background noise for sleep, work, and concentration since college. But he only got into the business of making it by accident when he ran into the same problem as Elon Uhlendorf.
- [16:37]
Brandon Reed
My newborn son wasn't sleeping. A lot of people know that struggle.
- [16:42]
Willa Paskin
This was in late 2018. There were already plenty of white noise options available. But like Elon, Brandon found that none of them were quite right for his needs. The options were way too short, or he could hear a file looping over and over again.
- [16:56]
Brandon Reed
So I was like, all right, I'll just make my own.
- [16:58]
Willa Paskin
So Brandon fired up GarageBand. He's a programmer, but he's not an audio engineer like Stephane. So he just started messing around with it until it generated a staticky sound.
- [17:08]
Brandon Reed
I don't even remember what button I clicked. I promise I've learned a lot more about this over the years. It's not just like, whoa. I just remember grabbing that EQ bar and grabbed the lows. I cranked them, I grabbed the highs, I brought them down, I made the mids really in the middle. And I was like, yeah, that is pleasing to my ear.
- [17:29]
Willa Paskin
Being a self identified techie, Brandon now wanted to devise a method to play his new Brown noise track all night for his baby.
- [17:36]
Brandon Reed
I wanted to run it on a home automation routine from a button that we have in our nursery.
- [17:41]
Mack Haygood
Right?
- [17:41]
Brandon Reed
Like you push the button, all the lights go down, the sound machines come on, whatever. Everything's automated, so it needed to be on the Internet, like something I could grab.
- [17:48]
Willa Paskin
The most convenient way for him to make it grabbable was to upload it to Spotify, which he was already using for another project. He titled it 12 Hour Sound Machines. Parentheses, no loops or fades, and queued it up for his son.
- [18:03]
Brandon Reed
If I had a toggle that was like, make private, I would have done that. And then no one else could find it, I would have totally toggled that.
- [18:10]
Willa Paskin
On that night, he played it in the nursery. And then the next night too. It became a habit. A few weeks later, he took a glance at the playback statistics for 12 hour sound machines. No loops or fades.
- [18:24]
Brandon Reed
I just went back in to see how many times I had listened to it, like, just out of curiosity. And I was like, whoa.
- [18:30]
Willa Paskin
Brandon had been expecting to find that it had been played exactly as many times as he'd used it for his son, but there were hundreds of more plays than that.
- [18:38]
Brandon Reed
I didn't expect anybody else to find this thing. And I was like, who is listening to 12 Hours of Brown Noise?
- [18:44]
Willa Paskin
Like, what is.
- [18:44]
Brandon Reed
What is this?
- [18:46]
Willa Paskin
Brandon didn't know it yet, but he had stumbled into a very timely opportunity. Spotify wants to be known for more than just music. It's investing big in a whole new area.
- [18:59]
Brandon Reed
Podcasts.
- [19:00]
Willa Paskin
When Brandon uploaded his track to Spotify as a podcast, it coincided with the moment when Spotify was beginning to heavily promote podcasts.
- [19:12]
Brandon Reed
It's really about expanding our mission from just being about music to being about all of audio and being the world's leading audio platform.
- [19:22]
Willa Paskin
Other white noise creators had also uploaded their files to spot Spotify as podcasts because they were too long to be music tracks. But the Spotify algorithm didn't make a distinction between a talkie podcast and a noise podcast. And so it started sending listeners to podcasts like 12 Hours Sound Machines, no loops or fades, inadvertently creating a noise boom. Let's start with one of the fastest.
- [19:50]
Mack Haygood
Growing podcast genres, which I did not see coming.
- [19:53]
Willa Paskin
White noise. Spotify users are reportedly playing Those sounds for 3 million hours a day. Spotify had turbocharged the noise business, making it more financially lucrative than ever before. But in doing so, it was building on something that had been brewing for decades, if not centuries. When we return, the pioneers who first discovered there was a business in noise.
- [20:28]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [21:02]
Brandon Reed
With a Venmo debit card, you can Venmo more than just your friends. You can use your balance in so many ways. You can Venmo everything. Need gas? You can Venmo this. How about snacks? You can Venmo that. Your favorite band's merch? You can Venmo this or their next show? You can Venmo that. Visit Venmo Me Debit to learn more.
- [21:20]
Willa Paskin
You can Venmo this or you can Venmo that. You can Venmo this or you can Venmo that. You can Venmo.
- [21:25]
Brandon Reed
The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp bank and a pursuant to license by MasterCard International Incorporated. Card may be used everywhere. MasterCard is accepted. Venmo purchase restrictions apply.
- [21:35]
Willa Paskin
Let's go back all the way back to before phones and cars and airplanes. To before church bells and ships and wagons. To before cities and houses. All the way back to prehistory. Back then, humankind relied upon our ears to alert us to danger. To a snake in the grass, to a fire catching, to a baby crying. We relied on our other senses, too, but our ears alone never shut. Even when we were asleep, they didn't stop listening. And now, all these millennia later, we're stuck with ears that never close. Not when a car alarm keeps going off, not when a faucet is dripping. Not when our partner is making chewing noises at breakfast. The most obvious way to contend with these unwanted noises is to try and get rid of them. To silence them, to banish the person making them. To stuff our ears, to soundproof our walls. But silence is hard to create and even harder to maintain. Think of whatever for you passes for quiet. It's not completely silent. The wind will blow. A bird might tweet. Certainly you'll be there breathing. And so people have realized that when you're seeking quiet, rather than trying to get rid of the sounds you don't want, it's more effective to mask them with the ones that you do. It's counterintuitive, but to stop noise, you can use more noise.
- [23:17]
Mack Haygood
We're fighting sound with sound in order to have a kind of agency, in order to have a way to control your own consciousness.
- [23:27]
Willa Paskin
Mack Haygood is a professor at Miami University, Ohio, and the author of Hush Media and Sonic Self Control.
- [23:35]
Mack Haygood
One of the things that people find very threatening or annoying about sound is it can kind of just dominate our consciousness whether we want it to or not. And so to have this ability to control the sounds around us, that's something that I think has been a dream for centuries.
- [23:54]
Willa Paskin
All the way back in the 1600s, Pope Clement IX was suffering from such severe insomnia that he went to the sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini for help. Bernini built him a contraption that replicated the sound of flowing water. After using it for one night, the Pope declared Bernini a genius. Over the following centuries, many people tried all sorts of things to contend with unwanted sounds. They tried to make silent rooms and to build silence. Silent suits. And then in 1960, someone started to imagine a device that wouldn't create silence. It would just provide the right kind of noise. A traveling salesman named James Buckwalter.
- [24:41]
Mack Haygood
One night he's in one of these roadside motels right on the edge of this highway, and the air conditioning is broken. And he can't sleep all night because of this broken air conditioner. But it wasn't because he was hot. It was because suddenly he could hear the noise of the highway. And he started thinking about the air conditioner and realizing that it didn't just cool air, it also created this kind of acoustic privacy.
- [25:12]
Willa Paskin
And he thought maybe he could create that too. Buchwalter worked for the Worcester Rubber Company, which would later become Rubbermaid. Before climbing to vice president of sales, he'd invented the rubber dishwasher rack and the rubber floor mats that go in cars. So now he set out to build a machine that could counteract an unpleasant noise with a pleasant one. That could replace the intermittent room of the highway with a hum like an air conditioner.
- [25:39]
Mack Haygood
So he gets a piece of plywood and he cuts out a circular base. And then he finds a motor for from a record turntable. And then he cuts these fan blades out of a coffee can and attaches that to the motor.
- [25:55]
Willa Paskin
After punching some holes into a tin saucepan and placing it over the fan blades, Buck Walter was left with a dome shaped device that looked kind of like a room service tray with slits popped in the top.
- [26:06]
Mack Haygood
He plugs it in, it starts making this whooshing sound. He puts it next to his bed, and he and his wife find that they sleep better.
- [26:17]
Willa Paskin
Buckwalter told his friends about his invention and soon they all wanted to sleep better too. He realized there was business potential in his noise fighting machine. If only he didn't draw too much attention to the fact that the machine made noise itself.
- [26:34]
Mack Haygood
You have to think about the fact that up until that point, noise was an industrial byproduct that people didn't want. And they really avoided using the word noise like they were afraid that it would scare people away.
- [26:50]
Willa Paskin
So they named it the Sleepmate and they began marketing it primarily to housewives.
- [26:56]
Mack Haygood
They used a Lot of images of sleeping women, just sort of like this picture of peace.
- [27:04]
Willa Paskin
By 1966, Sleepmate had made its way into the Sears and Roebuck catalog and sales started to take off. Soon Buckwalter introduced an identical machine, renamed the Soundscreen, and marketed it to businesses to cover up noisy office spaces. With the Sleepmate and the Soundscreen, Buckwalter had done more than start a successful company. He'd brought the first modern white noise machine into the world and taught Americans that not all noise was bad noise.
- [27:37]
Mack Haygood
Buck Walter domesticated noise. He turned it into something helpful and good. Or at least he was part of the rebranding of noise, where we perceive noise as being not only a threat and a hindrance, but also a helper.
- [27:53]
Willa Paskin
Almost as soon as the Sleepmate appeared, it began to inspire copycats, other devices that masked unwanted noises with a nice, constant humorous. And around the same time, another major innovation in sound masking was hitting the shelves. It wasn't sold as a sleep aid, though. It was meant to expand your consciousness, and it came on a vinyl record.
- [28:23]
Mack Haygood
There were people who recorded nature before Irv Thibel, but Irv Thible is the first person who marketed those sounds as having some kind of psychological utility that they could improve your life.
- [28:40]
Willa Paskin
In the late 1960s, Irv Thybald was a magazine photographer and a bit of a hustler. While working on a friend's experimental film project, he became obsessed with the sound of the ocean. He started going all over the east coast recording waves. And then using giant room sized computers, he processed all the clips into a seamless recording. He began selling it in 1969 as an LP called Environments, the psychologically ultimate seashore. Other Environments records full of more nature sounds soon followed. Summer cornfield, dawn in the Okefenokee spring swamp.
- [29:24]
Irv Thybald
I'd say that the reproduction is so good that you. You literally fool the mind.
- [29:28]
Willa Paskin
This is an interview with Tybalt from the early 1980s.
- [29:31]
Irv Thybald
It's so realistic that even if the sun is shining through the window, you listen to about five minutes of the thunderstorm and you believe it's raining.
- [29:42]
Mack Haygood
He also said that these records would help you go on mental trips with your friends.
- [29:48]
Elon Uhlendorf
Friends.
- [29:49]
Mack Haygood
He said that these records were great for lovemaking and there are quite a.
- [29:54]
Irv Thybald
Few people out there that use our recordings instead of drugs. As it was.
- [29:58]
Mack Haygood
He said that these records would make your plants grow faster, it would make the room seem brighter. Like he had like all of these sort of utopian visions for what these nature sounds could do for not only an individual, but For a community, there's just something lovely about the idea of, like a bunch of friends, like, lying on the floor and like, listening to the country stream rush by.
- [30:26]
Willa Paskin
But Irv Thybald knew there was another option entirely with these records. Rather than actively listening or doing drugs to them, you could just not pay attention to them at all.
- [30:39]
Irv Thybald
And we actually put out sounds that you can ignore, that you just have it on and on and on, and you don't go get tired of it because you've never really listened.
- [30:48]
Willa Paskin
Brian Eno coined the term ambient music to describe a recording that should create an ambiance, an atmosphere, and that you should be able to pay attention to or ignore as you see fit. The first Environments records were released a few years before this word existed, but that's pretty much what they were, and they were a huge hit. The first three Environments albums were distributed by Atlantic Records. They got rave reviews from music critics.
- [31:18]
Mack Haygood
I think the quote from Rolling Stone was something like, great for crashing and bawling.
- [31:25]
Willa Paskin
Ultimately, they would sell in the millions. Environments was influential in all sorts of ways, but for our purposes, it was important for modernizing this other way of fighting sound. Now there were two commercially available strategies to do this. The mechanical noise machines invented by James Buckwalter and the psychedelic nature sound recordings conjured by Irv tybel. By the 1980s, they were keeping company on chintzy clock radio type gadgets you could find at stores like Hammocker, Schlemmer, Bed, Bath and Beyond, and the Sharper Image. These devices could play you a nice mechanical whir and the sound of a babbling brook. These machines were not exactly rare, but they were extraneous curiosities, the kind of goofy thing only possessed by the person who had too much. And that's what they might have remained if not for smartphones, which, starting in the late 2000s, put a white noise machine in all of our pockets.
- [32:30]
Mack Haygood
These kinds of white noise and nature sound uses very, very quickly migrate into app form on the phones, and they just really proliferate.
- [32:41]
Brandon Reed
The sleep app business is booming.
- [32:43]
Willa Paskin
There are dozens of apps out there.
- [32:44]
Mack Haygood
Just like this one with some white noise.
- [32:46]
Brandon Reed
I'm telling you guys, when I put this on by my bedside, it really does help put you to sleep.
- [32:53]
Willa Paskin
The white noise business had entered a new, more robust phase than ever before. And one of the people to dive in was Stephane Pigeon.
- [33:04]
Dr. Stephane Pigeon
He said, mmm, okay, let's do something better.
- [33:10]
Willa Paskin
When we come back, how the seemingly insatiable demand for noise birthed a class of entrepreneur.
- [33:23]
Unknown
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- [33:55]
Willa Paskin
So when we last heard from Stephane Pigeon, he was explaining how he personally came did not like to listen to white noise.
- [34:03]
Dr. Stephane Pigeon
I mean, as an engineer, I love the white noise because it makes my measurements easier. But listening to that. No, no, no, no, no, no.
- [34:12]
Willa Paskin
But then, just a few years into the iPhone's existence, he discovered that there was a burgeoning market out there. Regular people looking for background sound to mask noise and concentrate and sleep. And when Stefan looked at the early white noise options available, they seemed shockingly primitive to him.
- [34:34]
Dr. Stephane Pigeon
What I felt was, oh, wow, they are really living in some prehistorical state. It's like cavemen starting a fire with stones.
- [34:44]
Willa Paskin
He knew he could do better. In 2013, he launched his own site, Mynoise. From the start, he wanted his noises to stay stand out from the basic flat, inert stuff. He wanted his to be interactive, customizable.
- [35:00]
Dr. Stephane Pigeon
To your needs, so that you are not bound to white noise only. You can basically make any color that you want.
- [35:09]
Willa Paskin
For every sound on the site, he's provided 10 movable sliders. Each of those sliders controls a set of frequencies. You can raise and lower them to your liking. If you want, you can pull down the high frequencies from his white noise to turn it into pink or brown noise. And Stephane didn't stop there. He realized he could use the same approach for natural sounds too, like the sound of the jungle. To make this track, he actually went on vacation to Sumatra.
- [35:38]
Dr. Stephane Pigeon
Some people bring a camera with them. I always bring a recorder while in.
- [35:44]
Willa Paskin
While in the jungle. Stephane, listening really closely to the noises around him, was mindful to record a whole spectrum of different sounds.
- [35:53]
Dr. Stephane Pigeon
I've been crazy enough to find a sound in the jungle that would fill all the frequencies. The high frequencies are covered by insects playing. I have a monkey making vocalization, toads and frogs for the lower frequency, the rumbling of a thunder to occupy the very low frequencies. And when you play all together, you get a white noise in the sense that all the frequencies are played. But using sounds from nature.
- [36:34]
Willa Paskin
Stefan has made hundreds of Soundscapes like this that users can manipulate. And they do. MyNoise now gets around 200,000 listeners a day, and users can leave donations on the site. It's not a gold mine, but it's enough for Stephane to make a good living.
- [36:50]
Dr. Stephane Pigeon
I'm very happy and I'm so grateful to devote a full time on creating noises, which is a crazy but so passionate job.
- [37:02]
Willa Paskin
Back when Stephane started doing this work in the early 2010s, the idea that making noise can be a job at all was not widespread. But that started to change in 2019, remember, that's when Spotify started promoting podcasts, inadvertently boosting white noise podcasts, too. White noise and all the money it was making, some people was suddenly all over the news.
- [37:28]
Irv Thybald
Take a look at Spotify, please. Some talk here about podcasters making serious.
- [37:33]
Willa Paskin
Serious money just by playing white noise, reportedly costing Spotify millions of dollars each year. Internal Spotify documents showed that to the company's chagrin, it was shelling out $38 million annually to white noise podcast creators, some of whom were individually making as much as $18,000 a month from ads. And as all of this was starting to happen, Brandon Reed happened to upload a podcast to Spotify to help his son sleep and suddenly found hundreds of people listening to it.
- [38:08]
Brandon Reed
What I felt at that time was that, listen, this is clearly like some kind of snowball.
- [38:13]
Willa Paskin
But his first instinct was not to monetize that snowball.
- [38:18]
Brandon Reed
I was like, I don't think I can wake up a baby with a meundies ad. I just can't. Like, that would just. That would really, really ruin the snowball.
- [38:27]
Willa Paskin
But Brandon did upload a few more noise files, and within a couple years, he was getting 100,000 downloads a day. And 12 hour sound machines, no loops or fades, was regularly appearing in Spotify's most popular podcast charts, once even cracking the top 20.
- [38:43]
Brandon Reed
And then that takes me to like, when I really started treating it seriously, I was like, okay, this is a business. This is a thing. People are willing to pay for this. And I started publishing very regularly. Thanks for listening to the 12 hour sound machine machines podcast. I genuinely hope that it's helpful for you and your specific needs.
- [39:00]
Willa Paskin
He expanded out of synthetic noises into naturalistic ones, often recording sounds himself. His company, dwellspring, now offers scores of different sounds, a subscription service and an app. And his original podcast reaches 1.3 million people a week. And it does have ads at the beginning. Now the revenue has been enough for him to quit his job at Disney to focus on his company full time.
- [39:25]
Brandon Reed
I mean, you just wouldn't believe the number of people that if, like, if it comes up at an airport when someone's like, what, 12 hour sound machines. I sleep to that every night.
- [39:33]
Willa Paskin
Stories of people like Brandon, who turned that initial Spotify push into a thriving business, have spread. And copycats have latched onto the idea of white noise as an easy way to generate some passive income.
- [39:47]
Mack Haygood
This white noise video took me about half an hour to make, and in the last year alone, it has made me $2,303.03.
- [39:59]
Willa Paskin
It's not just happening on Spotify, which actually has changed its payout policies so as not to shell out millions to white noise podcasters. YouTube is full of white noise videos too, and full of tutorials on how to get rich quick off of white noise videos.
- [40:17]
Mack Haygood
Estimated yearly earnings, guys. $1 million each year. Just an audio track with relaxing white noise.
- [40:26]
Ryan Reynolds
You don't have to come up with anything new and revolutionary. You can just copy and paste.
- [40:32]
Willa Paskin
Slopmeisters and bots doing the bare minimum proliferate showing up in the same search results as human beings putting in effort. People like Brandon and Stefan, who spend a lot of time thinking about what they're audiences want, they've both been surprised by how many requests they get.
- [40:51]
Brandon Reed
People reach out all the time and say what they want. One was somebody that reached out and said, hey, I used to work all day next to this hallway that would get buffed all the time. Like, somebody would come by with a buffer. Like, I miss that sound.
- [41:05]
Dr. Stephane Pigeon
One of those special requests was the sound of the Landromat. Who wants to listen to washing machines? I didn't understand at all.
- [41:17]
Brandon Reed
A lot of people reached out and said, I was in the hospital for a month and a half. And like, I got used to those sounds. Like the slow, steady beep of a heart rate monitor, the shuffling of feet on a cold tile floor. Like, I got used to those things and it's the only way I can sleep now.
- [41:31]
Dr. Stephane Pigeon
I realized that sound is very personal and depends on your own life history.
- [41:40]
Willa Paskin
The seemingly insatiable demand for noise, and bespoke noise at that, has convinced Brandon that despite the vast quantity of sounds already available, the sky is still the limit.
- [41:51]
Brandon Reed
I would not be where I am doing what I am doing right now if I didn't believe that we're not even close to saturation in our market. Like, it's not even close. Who sleeps? Everybody. Everybody sleeps. Who is stressed and needs to, like, find a moment to restore everybody.
- [42:10]
Willa Paskin
When Brandon first said this, I was skeptical. I mean, more people may come to white noise, but isn't there already enough of it to sate them? It's true, though, that the story of white noise to this point has been one of almost exponential growth. As hard as it is to imagine that strictly speaking, we need more of it, there's no reason to think we won't get it. But there's something else I wonder too about the future of white noise. That's whether it's going to be provided by people.
- [42:44]
Irv Thybald
Today, robots or some form of AI are creating music, composing it.
- [42:50]
Mack Haygood
I don't think it's an overestimation to say that AI in music is the.
- [42:55]
Ryan Reynolds
Biggest thing that's happened since the advent of streaming.
- [43:00]
Willa Paskin
I am desperately hopeful that there are some things human beings can accomplish that even the best large language learning model will not be able to match. And yet, if artificial intelligence could plausibly and satisfactorily generate any kind of sound at all, you'd think it'd be able to handle the ones we've been talking about today. Sounds that are rule bound, that can be and already are generated by programs that are often indistinguishable from one another, that are regularly put on not to be heard.
- [43:37]
Elon Uhlendorf
Making white noise is something that generative AI, a properly trained generative AI model should be able to do much more easily than generating convincing music.
- [43:47]
Willa Paskin
This is Elon Uhlendorf again. You heard from him at the top of the episode. He's constantly thinking about technology and algorithms as a designer, a teacher, a substacker. He's also the guy who assembled his own baby soothing track, layering a heartbeat and his own shushing over a white noise background. He thinks that if there had been an easier way to make it back, then he totally would have used it.
- [44:16]
Elon Uhlendorf
Had I had the option to appoint an AI clone of myself, I would have done it in a heartbeat and I would have slept like a baby.
- [44:25]
Willa Paskin
He no longer uses this track anymore, but at some point he became curious to see what an AI might have come up with.
- [44:32]
Elon Uhlendorf
The prompt I gave it was looped recording of a parent making a sh noise to calm a baby to sleep over the sounds of a heartbeat and white noise, comma calming track for falling asleep.
- [44:45]
Willa Paskin
This is what it generated.
- [44:50]
Elon Uhlendorf
What I described as Foley artist B roll for a horror film. And it was different every time I did it, but it sounded like whimpering and like there were like monsters.
- [45:10]
Willa Paskin
Like.
- [45:10]
Elon Uhlendorf
The opposite of what you would want if you were trying to calm yourself and fall asleep.
- [45:19]
Willa Paskin
As with so many things with AI, it's not there yet, but it might be one day. Maybe at some point, no one will have to email their request to Brandon or Stefan. No one will have to make a track for themselves. They can just ask for any bespoke sound they want. Maybe it's their actual partner sleeping, or the laundromat where they did clothes as a kid. Or the sound of them shushing. But even if and when AI gets there, you can count Elon Uhlendorf's household out. Since the initial baby sleeping crisis that had Elon making a track himself, they've gotten back to basics. Elon sometimes uses plain white noise, which.
- [46:03]
Elon Uhlendorf
Is something I never would have done before.
- [46:05]
Willa Paskin
But his partner feels differently.
- [46:07]
Elon Uhlendorf
She now needs earplugs if there's white noise on. She was like, no, that's the exact thing that I'm trying to silence.
- [46:19]
Willa Paskin
Sorry, you're saying that you have become a convert to white noise and your partner has become so aggravated by white noise that she, like, she now considers white noise just like noise that she can't have while she's going to sleep.
- [46:33]
Elon Uhlendorf
Right. White noise is another noise that she needs to filter out.
- [46:38]
Willa Paskin
This raises maybe the biggest question about noises of all, one we haven't touched on yet. Is there a point where we should be filtering white noise out? A stage at which it becomes too much? Should we really be listening to noises of our own choosing all the time? They may be useful, helpful, necessary even. But are they good for us?
- [47:02]
Mack Haygood
It feels so comfortable to have control over our environment, and yet the unintended consequences of that are feelings of isolation and, you know, ennui.
- [47:15]
Willa Paskin
Mack Haygood, the author of Media and Sonic Self Control, knows how loud the world can be, how invasive certain sounds are, how disruptive, how unpleasant, how crazy making. He understands their power and why we've developed all sorts of tools for blocking them out. But he also wonders if we haven't taken it too far.
- [47:36]
Mack Haygood
Ironically, the more we try to manage the sounds around us, the more sensitive to sound we become. Like the way to treat tinnitus, or hyperacusis, which is extreme sound sensitivity is actually exposure therapy. And eventually, they're not tormented that way anymore. But what I think we're doing is the exact opposite. We're using our headphones and white noise to completely manage our experience at all times, which only makes us more sensitive to, you know, unmediated moments.
- [48:12]
Willa Paskin
Mac is saying this even though he thinks that our desire to control sound is ancient mythic. When you ask him about the earliest examples of white noise. He doesn't start with the environment's records or the Sleepmate or Bernini. He goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks and a bard named Orpheus.
- [48:32]
Mack Haygood
He's one of the Argonauts, even though he's kind of like this sensitive poet dude who plays this harp like instrument called the lyre.
- [48:40]
Willa Paskin
But his musical skills proved essential when the Argonauts encountered the Sirens.
- [48:46]
Mack Haygood
These bird like women with these beautiful voices that would lure sailors to their island.
- [48:55]
Willa Paskin
So when the Argonauts sail by the Sirens, Orpheus hatches a plan.
- [48:59]
Mack Haygood
Orpheus takes out his lyre and he plays his countersong to fight the song of of the Sirens and they travel on their merry way.
- [49:14]
Willa Paskin
Fighting sound with sound saved the day. But you know what happened after Orpheus and the Argonauts got past the Sirens? Well, it wasn't Orpheus playing his lyre for 12 hour drags every single day. The Argonauts didn't use it for work and sleep and trips to the coffee shop. They didn't hit repeat. They went out and had a whole life full of adventures with the sound of that life turned on. And maybe there's a lesson in there too. It's one Mack now takes to heart as he leaves the house without his headphones.
- [49:49]
Mack Haygood
I think that is a change that's happened in me over the years. As I've seen the way that we fight. Sound sort of becomes so prevalent that it's got me a little bit worried that we're throwing the baby out with the bath water that you're trying to avoid sounds that you don't want to hear. But you will never know what sounds you might have liked to hear that you have negated or masked or canceled out.
- [50:36]
Willa Paskin
This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. If you aren't already a Slate plus member, I would really love you to subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking Try Free at the top of the Decoder Ring show page. Or you can visit slate.comdecoder/ to get access wherever you listen. Slate+ members get to listen to our show and every other Slate podcast without ads and you'll get unlimited access to Slate's website. Also, you get to listen to our bonus episodes. So please. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts by clicking try free or visit slate.comdecoder plus to sign up. You can find Stephane Pigeon sound generators@mynoise.net there's a lot of things to listen to and play around with as there is with Brandon Reed's Dwellspring, which you can find on Spotify and also at Dwellspring IO. Mac Haygood's book is called Hush Media and Sonic Self Control, and he also hosts a podcast all about sound called Phantom Power.
- [51:39]
Dr. Stephane Pigeon
You should.
- [51:39]
Willa Paskin
You should also check out Elon Uhlendorf's illuminating substack Escape the Algorithm. We'd also like to thank Dan Berlau, Sarah Anderson, and Ashley Carman. Ashley's reporting for Bloomberg broke the story of Spotify's inadvertent investment in white noise podcasts, and we'll link to her multiple scoops on our show page. This episode was written by Katie Shepherd, Evan Chung, and me. It was produced by Katie Shepard. We produced Decoder Ring with Max Friedman and Evan is our supervising producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us@decoder ringlate.com and you can also call us now at our new Decoder Ring hotline. That number is 347-460-7281. We'd love to hear any and all of your ideas ideas for the show. We'll see you in two weeks.