Streaming noise

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Wednesday, November 30th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: white noise.

You hear that? We used to call it static. And we didn’t like it very much.

But today, we find it useful—useful as background noise to help get to sleep or to cover up the noise in the other cubicle.

Maybe you’re as old as I am and you remember manipulating the rabbit-ear antenna to get a better TV signal or fiddling with the knob on the radio dial to get rid of static.

REICHARD: But now, many people are paying to listen to static. Streaming services make millions of dollars off it, sometimes more money than real music brings in.

Why? Here’s WORLD Correspondent Amy Lewis.

AUDIO: [FAN]

DEWBERRY: I lived in a house that didn't have air conditioning in the Pacific Northwest on a busy road and so we would have to open the windows to let air in in the summer. And a fan just helped with the white noise.

AMY LEWIS, CORRESPONDENT: Rhonda Dewberry lives in South Carolina. She describes herself as a white noise addict.

DEWBERRY: And then it just became something I felt like I needed to sleep. So I sleep with a fan every night of the year no matter what the temperature is.

SOUND: [WHITE NOISE]

White noise is a broad spectrum noise where all the frequencies have an equal amount of input. Just like white light that has all the colors in the same intensity, white noise has all the frequencies.

But it’s not just static. White noise artists use algorithms of sound to create tracks…and some of those tracks are edging out music with melodies. For example, playing the 90-second “Clean White Noise” on a loop all night racks up 280 plays. It’s been played more than 887 million times, earning the artist millions of dollars in royalties. For the one “song.”

Michelle Colburn is a doctor of audiology at the Solinsky Hearing Center in Connecticut. She says people use white noise most frequently to cover other sounds.

COLBURN: It's the one that is used a lot in like noise generators, and very often recommended for patients who have tinnitus, which is a ringing or some sort of external sound inside their ear, to kind of mask that…

It doesn’t change the volume of the tinnitus, just the awareness of it.

Before COVID sent everyone home, Charlie Meeker had to listen to white noise five days a week. He worked in a seven-story office building in Portland, Oregon.

CHARLIE MEEKER: …and you don't really notice it most of the time…If somebody is talking at a normal tone of voice…a few cubes away, you really don't hear them. It drowns it all out, which is nice.

The sound was always there. Every so often, an announcement came on the PA system.

MEEKER: You first hear that the white noise goes off a few seconds before you hear the announcement. And so, although you don't notice the white noise when it's there, you can notice when it's not there.

AUDIO: [BIRDS AT COOLABAH]

Janice Matthews grew up in a remote area of northern California. If she needed peace, she headed outside to the sound of birds and the wind in the evergreens.

Now Matthews is a life recovery counselor for the Union Gospel Mission in Spokane, Washington. It’s housed in an old concrete building.

MATTHEWS: …but concrete conducts sound, I can hear exactly what they're saying in the next room.

AUDIO: [WHITE NOISE]

So Matthews started using white noise machines. But soon, she noticed a problem.

MATTHEWS: And then I could not pay attention to what my client was saying. Like, it just made my brain like, my brain was white noising. And as soon as I have the opportunity to turn it off, like I feel my anxiety go ‘Ahhh.’

Although white noise has benefits, Michelle Colburn says it also has drawbacks.

COLBURN: Another school of thought is any type of constant, extraneous noise that's being presented to the body can be stressful. Think of living near an airport. If you're constantly hearing that airport and airport noise all the time, it raises, you know, your body's anxiety and stress levels, releases chemicals into the brain that are just not healthy for us.

Colburn is most concerned for those who have white noise running all night.

COLBURN: But if you listen to it, while you sleep for eight hours, that accumulative effect can be just as dangerous as listening to, you know, a gunshot for a very small period of time.

There’s a rainbow of noise colors that people like to listen to, named after their sound frequencies. There’s green noise…

AUDIO: [GREEN NOISE]

blue noise…

AUDIO: [BLUE NOISE]

pink noise…

AUDIO: [PINK NOISE]

BRADBEER: Proponents of pink noise say it's a bit more natural than white noise. So pink noise has more volume at the more bass end of the scale and less volume at the more treble end of the scale.

AUDIO: [BROWN NOISE]

There’s even Brown or Brownian noise, named after the man who discovered the erratic motion of inanimate particles in water.

BRADBEER: And that sounds a bit more like a, you know, like a torrent of a river, sort of, sort of rushing.

Andrew Bradbeer is a sleep and respiratory specialist with Manse Medical Clinic in Victoria, Australia. He says the jury is still out about the effect of all that noise.

BRADBEER: It's an area I think, where the technology has progressed a little bit ahead, ahead of the science. We've all got these little devices that can be white noise, or pink noise, or brown noise generators, and we've got them in our pockets and the question then is, okay, is it, is it any good? Is it helpful? And, and the science is actually saying, we really don't know yet.

He says our sleep issues are usually more complex than what can be masked by more noise.

BRADBEER: It's sometimes easiest to reach out and try the sound app. But there are other things that you can do that, that will be helpful and sometimes those other things are more important.

Back in South Carolina, Rhonda Dewberry says she filled her home with noise after she suffered trauma. Dewberry began listening constantly to either classical music or white noise.

DEWBERRY: Yeah, some kind of noise would keep my brain from going places maybe I didn't want it to go. Now that I am emotionally healthy and strong. I don't mind silence. In fact, I kind of enjoy it…

She says she’s learning to sit in silence.

DEWBERRY: I go outside so I can be quiet. And maybe that's why I feel connected to God out there because there's less distractions in a way.

AUDIO: [CRICKETS]

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Amy Lewis.

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