Short Stuff: Colorful Noises

Summary

Short Stuff: Colorful Noises

Podcast: Stuff You Should Know
Hosts: Josh Clark & Charles W. (Chuck) Bryant
Release Date: April 9, 2025

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Introduction to Colorful Noises

In this episode of Short Stuff, hosts Josh Clark and Charles W. (Chuck) Bryant delve into the fascinating world of "colorful noises," exploring various types such as white noise, brown noise, and pink noise. The discussion aims to shed light on how these sounds are perceived, their origins, and their practical applications in everyday life.

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Types of Noise: White, Brown, and Pink

Charles W. Chuck Bryant initiates the conversation by introducing the concept of different "color noises" — white, brown, and pink. He mentions, “We're doing one on the different color noises. You know, white noise, brown noise, pink noise” (00:40).

• White Noise: Described as encompassing all frequencies, white noise is akin to the sound of light rain or a gentle breeze through trees. It's commonly used to aid sleep and mask other disruptive sounds.

• Brown Noise: Characterized by deeper tones with more bass and lower frequencies, brown noise resembles natural sounds like river rapids or distant thunder. Chuck humorously refers to himself as a "brown nose adherent" (01:43).

• Pink Noise: Positioned between white and brown noise, pink noise offers a balance by accentuating mid-range frequencies. It's perceived as more soothing to those who find white noise too harsh but brown noise too bass-heavy.

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Historical Background: Robert Brown and Brown Noise

The hosts delve into the origins of brown noise, attributing its name to Robert Brown, a Scottish scientist from the early 1800s. Brown observed the random movements of pollen grains under a microscope, a phenomenon later explained by atomic particle interactions by Albert Einstein. Chuck explains, “...brown noise is named after Robert Brown, because he tried to figure out how to quantify these random movements” (03:35).

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Applications of Different Noises

Josh Clark and Charles W. Chuck Bryant discuss the practical uses of these noises:

• Sleep Aid: White noise is widely used to help individuals fall asleep faster by drowning out background disturbances. Studies mentioned indicate that white noise can reduce the time it takes to fall asleep by up to 40% (08:55).

• Focus and Relaxation: Brown noise is utilized by some, like their friend Jerry, to enhance concentration and relaxation. However, Josh notes that while it didn’t initially help him focus at work, he appreciates its utility for sleep (01:26; 01:34).

• Memory Enhancement: Pink noise has been linked to improved memory recall. Josh cites a study where participants exposed to pink noise during sleep showed better recollection of vocabulary words, such as remembering "pickle" over "cucumber" (09:20; 09:37).

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Technology: Noise Generating Apps

The hosts highlight technological advancements in noise generation:

• Dwellspring App: Created by Brandon Reed, a friend of the show and Guinness record holder, Dwellspring offers a variety of colored noises, including niche sounds like crackling fireplaces and airplane cabin ambiance (07:19; 08:10).

• Usage Tips: Chuck suggests using dedicated speakers for better sound quality and shares a personal tip of using a pillow to enhance the sound experience for naps (12:04; 13:02).

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Scientific Studies on Noise and Sleep/Memory

The episode references several studies to underscore the efficacy of colored noises:

1. Oxford Study (2017): Involved eight participants who listened to white noise while sleeping. Results showed a 40% faster onset of sleep, though overall sleep quality remained unchanged (08:55).

2. Vocabulary Recall Study: A year prior, a study with 16 young adults found that those who slept with pink noise had improved recall of specific vocabulary words compared to the control group (09:20).

3. Northwestern Study (2017): Focused on 13 older adults and concluded that pink noise not only provided deeper sleep but also enhanced memory recall abilities (09:55).

4. Iranian Study: The most robust, involving 60 elderly coronary patients in a hospital setting. Half used white noise generators, while the other half did not. Those using white noise maintained consistent sleep quality despite the disruptive hospital environment, whereas the control group experienced degraded sleep over time (10:31; 11:55).

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Personal Experiences and Anecdotes

Josh and Chuck share personal insights and anecdotes related to the use of colored noises:

• Jerry’s Experience: Unlike typical users who utilize noise for sleep, Jerry uses brown noise to relax or concentrate, highlighting its versatility (00:40; 01:07).

• Hospital Sleep Challenges: Josh empathizes with individuals like Yumi, who struggled with sleep disruptions while caring for her brother in a hospital. He criticizes the hospital environment for its repetitive noises and poor sleep conditions, advocating for solutions like white noise generators (10:32; 11:31).

• Humorous Remarks: The hosts inject humor into their discussion, referencing phrases like "pickles vs. cucumbers" in memory studies and Chuck’s playful napping techniques involving pillows and rum (09:37; 13:02).

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Conclusion

Josh Clark and Charles W. Chuck Bryant effectively dissect the concept of colorful noises, offering listeners a comprehensive understanding of white, brown, and pink noises. Through historical context, scientific studies, technological applications, and personal anecdotes, they illustrate the profound impact these sounds can have on sleep, focus, and memory. The episode concludes with practical advice for listeners seeking to harness the benefits of colored noises in their daily lives.

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Notable Quotes

• Charles W. Chuck Bryant: “Brown noise is deeper, has lower frequencies. It's got more bass, minimalizes that higher frequency.” (02:04)

• Josh Clark: “In Kyoto, Japan, there is a park where the sound of wind blowing through bamboo is a protected heritage site.” (05:24)

• Charles W. Chuck Bryant: “The sound of brown noise is literally the formula for the sound of pollen moving, which is just kooky to think about.” (04:00)

• Josh Clark: “Sleeping with white noise in hospitals could prevent sleep quality degradation over time.” (11:56)

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References

• Transcript Timestamps: Referenced throughout the summary for accurate attribution.
• Dwellspring App: Available on various app platforms for those interested in exploring colored noises.

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Note: This summary is based on the transcript provided and aims to encapsulate the key discussions and insights from the episode "Short Stuff: Colorful Noises." For a complete experience, listening to the full episode is recommended.

Transcript

[Josh Clark]

Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees. Just ask the Capital One bank guy. It's pretty much all he talks about in a good way. He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast too. Thanks, Capital One Bank Guy. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capital1.com bank capital1na member FDIC. Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh Clark, and this is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And Jerry's there. She doesn't have a sound associated with her because she's already listening to sound. And this is Short stuff.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, we're doing one on the different color noises. You know, white noise, brown noise, pink noise. And Jerry literally just said, hey, I'm listening to brown noise right now, which I've never heard of anyone just listening to noise unless they were trying to sleep or, you know, at a place where they were trying to block out other noise. But I think Jerry just said it, like, helped her relax or something. Or concentrate, focus. What'd she say?

[Josh Clark]

I think she said, yeah, kind of.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

The same thing I said, but with a different word.

[Josh Clark]

I used to try it too, during work. It is supposed to help you focus and at the very least, drown out other noises. But it just didn't take with me, at least at first. At least for working. I get it.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

You do like ambient music now, don't you?

[Josh Clark]

Yes, but I get it for sleep, for sure, which is what most people use it for. Jerry's an odd duck.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And I have been on record before. I'm a brown nose adherent. Brown noise. Did know, apparently. Did I almost say brown nose?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I think you did say brown nose.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

It can also be called red nose or red noise, which I didn't know. But brown noise, as I've demonstrated on the show, if this is white noise.

[Josh Clark]

This is brown noise, and this is pink's noise.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

Brown noise is deeper, has lower frequencies. It's got more bass, minimalizes that higher frequency. And I didn't really know this, but apparently you can liken some of these to sounds in nature. And apparently brown noise is more akin to like a river rapid or a heavy rapid rainfall or thunder.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. Distant thunder, Rumbling thunder, even. Yeah, yeah. So obviously that's very alluring. Everybody likes those sounds. So brown noise makes sense. And because there's also white noise and pink noise, you think brown noise is just named after the color brown. Like, for some reason, maybe it evoked the color brown in the person who named it wrong, there was a scientist named Robert Brown from Scotland, who in the very early 1800s, was looking at pollen grains through his microscope and saw them basically dancing around. And he said, this is not possible because pollen is not alive. And he had no idea what this was. But he published his paper so that future generations could solve it. And apparently no less than Albert Einstein took it on and found this was an excellent demonstration of atomic particles interacting and basically moving ultimately, these pollen grains along. And the reason that it's named after Robert Brown, Brown Noises, because he tried to figure out how to quantify these random movements. Right. Yeah.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

And this is a part, like, I don't know, this is way above my scientific pay grade, so I'm not sure how you go about this, but. But he devised this mathematical formula to predict the movements of the pollen and used that to generate an electronic sound. And that was brown noise.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, well, other people who came used his formula to generate sound. I don't understand either, but yeah.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

So the sound of brown noise is literally the formula for the sound of pollen moving, which is just kooky to think about.

[Josh Clark]

It is, but it's pretty cool, too. I just think.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

Good fact of the show, I think.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. I mean, it's all math, so technically you could use math to translate into other kinds of math, I'm guessing. But just the idea of. Yeah. Figuring out how random movements can turn into sound is just. I love that stuff.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, me too.

[Josh Clark]

Let's talk about this offline, Chuck, while we take a break.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

All right. Well, we just had a great conversation about brown noise offline, but now we're going to talk about white noise, the higher cousin to brown noise. Obviously, it does have a range. It's not like it's just high frequency, but. But it's not as bass heavy. They have the lows in there. They have the mids and the highs. But white noise is used, aside from just sleeping a lot of times with noise canceling headphones and stuff masking other sounds, this one is akin, naturally, to a light rain or a gentle breeze through the trees. Sounds kind of nice, too.

[Josh Clark]

One of the coolest things I learned ever is that in Kyoto, Japan, there is a. The sound of wind blowing through bamboo in this one park is a protected heritage site. Like the sound itself is protected as a world heritage.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And I think I remember talking about that game I played, Ghost of Tsushima. I think that's what it's called. It was the sort of feudal Japanese Warrior PS4 game that I Played the sounds in that game. Oh, yeah, It's a gorgeous game. But the sounds of the wind blowing through the poppy fields and through the bamboo forest, like you could tell it was a thing that they really wanted to capture and they did.

[Josh Clark]

So that's cool. I think you're confusing that with Q, Bert.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, Dying. Dying. All right, what about pink noise?

[Josh Clark]

Pink noise is a little different. It's kind of like the compromise between white noise and brown noise because the white noise includes all frequencies. A lot of people are like, I don't like those high frequencies, especially when I'm trying to sleep. But I'm not down with just nothing but the low bass heavy stuff. Give me some mid range and maybe accentuate the lower and higher things a little bit, but not too much. And if you do that kind of stuff, you have pink noise.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And you know, I just realized I have my app here. I might as well figure out what pink noise sounds like because I wasn't exactly sure. So we can just play this if that's right with you.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, go ahead.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

So that's pink.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

That's white.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. I could be careful.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

I mean, that does sound like ocean waves. That's brown.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

But my app has a bunch of other colors and I'm not sure if this is like, hey, let's just go crazy. But there's also purple noise, blue noise.

[Josh Clark]

Which app are you talking about? Dwell Spring.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

No, no, no, this is a different one. But yeah, our friend actually developed a white noise app. Right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it's called dwellspring. The guy who created our website, Brandon Reed, friend of the show and just friend in general and also one time world record holder, Guinness record holder of the 400 piggyback.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

Man, what a dude.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, he created just a world class sound generator app. And in addition to all the different colored noises, he also has things like a box fan, the airplane cabin sound.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

That's the one I use on my app, but I forgot Brandon had his. I'm going to switch over just to support that.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it's really great. I mean, like, it's a really good app. The one that got me was crackling fireplace in a thunderstorm. Oh, buddy, that is niche. Yeah, exactly.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

That just put me to sleep thinking about it.

[Josh Clark]

Go check out dwellspring. It really is a good apple and I think it's everywhere you can get apps.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

I'm sure it is. Nice work, Brandon. So back to the noises as far as which one is best for sleep. There have been some very middling studies over the years. We'll mention a few of them, but the problem with these is in 2017, they were like, hey, let's get eight people in here and watch them sleep. Or the one in 2016, they got 16 people. There's just never a lot of folks. I guess bed space is probably not the easiest thing to do unless people are doing this at home. But at Oxford, in 2017, they got those eight people, and they said that they fell asleep 40% faster listening to white noise, but their overall sleep was about the same.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, but still falling asleep, not being able to fall asleep is a part of insomnia. Not being able to get back to sleep is another part of it too. So, yeah, I mean, I would say that's great. A year before, somebody decided that they wanted to see how much better you could recall vocabulary words if you slept using pink noise.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And I guess they found that 16 young adults who slept with pink noise had slightly improved recollection of vocabulary words. So they were like and pickle. Whereas the other, the control group couldn't ever remember pickle.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

They were like the green thing. That was a cucumber.

[Josh Clark]

Cucumber ones, they're like, man, I should have slept with pink noise.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

There was a study in 2017 from Northwestern of 13 older adults, and they said pink noise provided deeper sleep overall and improved again, ability to recall words.

[Josh Clark]

And again, that word was pickle.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

There was a study in Iran. This is probably the most robust of all of them. They looked at 60 elderly coronary patients, and they said, half of you are gonna sleep with white noise. The other half are not going to have white noise. But all of you are in a hospital. And if you've ever tried to sleep in a hospital, it should be illegal, the sounds that they have, because your sleep just deteriorates the longer you're in the hospital. It's awful. Yumi took care of her brother when he was in the hospital for, like, three weeks. She would stay there overnight.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

It's tough.

[Josh Clark]

She would. In addition to just all the bings and the beeps and all that stuff, the nurses come in and they're just like, hey, how's it going? It's time for your blood pressure. Like, and it's three in the morning. And that happens every. Like, you know, there's something that wakes you up every 20 minutes. And it's just so nuts that hospitals are just so aloof about that when we all know how important sleep is. And then that. And the nutrition in hospitals is abysmal as well. I should say American hospitals. Yeah, I just wanted to go off on that because it is something that should be fixed and remedied.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

No, it's tough. If you've ever had to be at a hospital for a long time supporting somebody or just being the patient, it is hard to sleep. The beds are not great. And they're always throwing on those fluorescent lights right when you're dosing off.

[Josh Clark]

It'd be like going to get your tires changed at Sears and they keep tacks all over the floor, you know, like they're just sabotaging themselves and doing what they're supposed to be doing, which is healing.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that's a good point. And we should say the results of the study, in the control group, they found the quality of sleep degraded as they obviously spent multiple nights there with all those beeps and let me check your blood pressure's happening. The ones who had the white noise, their quality of sleep remained basically the same throughout their stay, so it did not degrade over time.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, not bad.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

It's great.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, for sure. I mean, just put a white noise generator in every single room or give every patient dwellspring.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, exactly. Or, you know, there's that app. There's other apps. There are standalone sound machines that you can get. You know, this is just a little thing that you put beside your bed or maybe Jerry has beside her desk at work so she can sleep on the job. And then as far as, like, how to use it, that's up to you. Depending on what noise does best for you. Try different ones out. The volume. Try some different ones out. I find that I get my very best sort of put me to sleep stuff when I run it through an actual speaker instead of just through my phone speaker. Because you get some more deep bass resonance. Oh, yeah. And my napping trick is I will put a pillow over my head and face and stick that phone under there with me. And it creates this sort of echoey. Not echoey, but like a. Just sort of a. It traps the sound. It's like a cavern of sound. And that really gets me out.

[Josh Clark]

That and three shots of rum.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, you know, the afternoon rum.

[Josh Clark]

You got anything else, Man, I got nothing else. I think that was very nice of you. You gave some great advice to people who have trouble sleeping, which my heart goes out to people like that for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I guess that means short stuff is out.

[Charles W. Chuck Bryant]

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