Again Way OT: things I hear in white noise

[nat whilk II]

blue2blue started a great thread about phantom cell phone vibrations. Got me thinking of other physical/neurological/brain oddities I've experienced.

 

So far I've never met anyone who testifies to having the same experience as I'm about to relate (but with this BBS group I bet there's someone out there with something similar to tell):

 

I've been in the habit of sleeping with a white noise source for a long time. I think there's been a thread about this either in this or some ohter BBS I've read - it seems that sleeping with a fan or something on is pretty common.

 

So we have this big air cleaner next to the bed on my side, and when things are noisy in the house (kids, cars, tv, dishwasher, whatever) I just ooch a bit closer to the beautiful white noise to block it out.

 

But quite often while the white noise is going, I seem to hear music and/or voices - like a radio is on somewhere playing faintly. Before I figured this out, I used to get up and look for the source - never would find anything. I wondered if it was a sort of early dreaming, but no, I don't have to be particularly sleepy to hear these things.

 

I turn off the white noise, the music and or voice stops. Now that I'm used to this odd phenomenon, I can just kind of listen for it - see what's playing today! Hey!

 

FWIW: the music is usually a high melody, like the classical station is on in another room and I can just catch the faintest hint of the melody from the strings or the woodwinds. The voices are just like a quiet conversation at the other end of the house maybe coming very faintly through the ductwork or something. I never understand any actual words - the voices are never angry or anything - just placid, unintelligible, very faint.

 

I figure this is my brain trying to make sense of the little variations that occur in the white noise. Trying to pick something out of the noise but getting a little too pro-active about it. I don't think it's any sort of early schizo symptom - I'm quite mentally smooth and all-too-normal.

 

Anyone else? (Just don't get me started on lucid dreaming - that's another bunch of stories to bore you with...

 

nat whilk ii

[Lee Knight]

Like the little girl in Poltergeist staring at the TV... have you noticed anyone missing?

[nat whilk II]

Nope, no one missing. But it did occur to me, since there's a ton of electronic stuff in the bedroom, that it's just possible that we're picking up some radio off something or other....just dunno - one of those mysteries.

 

nat whilk ii

[blue2blue]

Well... we're ALL about pattern recognition... it's a fundamental component of animal/human intelligence, seems to me.

 

I have, in the past, had, shall we say, temporary states of "excess pattern recognition." Since I knew the source of the phenom, I never let it worry me. (And when I closed my eyes, at times, I got cool, moving patterns very much like Persion rug designs/fractals... gave me new insight into the whole "flying carpet" concept, I'l tell you.)

 

It also seemed to give me insight into the involuntary "excess pattern recognition" associated with acute schizophrenia... overdriving the pattern recognition part of the brain until you see interrelationships everywhere -- but not necessarily in a benign, cosmic way... more in a paranoid, they're out to get me way. It must be hell to be trapped in that...

 

_______________

 

Anyhow, coming from "DXing" as a little kid (seeing how distant a radio station you could pick up), I was used to trying to make out the scratchy, tinny, distorted voices in AM radio broadcasts thousands of miles away (late at night when my folks were sleeping, I'd hook up our superhereodyne AM radio up to the huge TV antenna my dad had installed trying to transcend an entirely different kind of "ghost" and listen for distant stations. I got Cuba's English language broadcasts a few times (probably easier, since I think they were higher power) as well as frequently getting stations in Texas, Kentucky, and, once or twice, the upstate NY area.

 

But you'd have to crank the sound way up and listen through mountains of crackly AM static -- not nearly as soothing as white noise, lemme tellya.

 

_________________

 

But the REALLY weird "phantom noises" I used to hear regularly were when I was playing my 100 plus year old upright grand piano... like a lot of bozo, amateur keyboardists, I have a heavy foot on the sustain pedal... and it was a very loose, reverberant piano to begin with.

 

Often, as I played my noodly arabesques, I would hear not-that-distant "conversations," hear what seemed like sirens -- and hear old-fashioned telephone ringers (all the phones in the house were electronic)... I'd stop playing, take my foot off the sustain pedal, and the phantom sounds would fade with the piano's reverberations.

 

It was a very common experience that I simply came to accept. I don't think I've had the same experience with other pianos -- with the POSSIBLE exception of the beat up piano I used to play as a kid at my best friend's house. (And only one of the two hand-me-down pianos they had... the other never had the same magic for me... although it did have a piano roll reader that was pretty darn cool until my pal's little brothers broke it.)

 

Anyhow... funny business.

[nat whilk II]

The bits I've read about psycho-acoustics reassures me that there's going to be a lot of interesting stuff in the overall experience of hearing: along the lines that the brain's activities in

sorting/blocking/remembering/suppressing/organizing/retrieving/comparing/synthesizing input is quite active.

 

So we're not exactly hearing "what's really there" as much as we are hearing "what humans are able to perceive of the original source after their own brains process the input, plus the odd variations that occur in individuals complicating the mix, as it were.

 

Lotsa room in there for fascinating phenomena.

 

nat whilk ii

[philbo]

 

Originally posted by blue2blue Well... we're ALL about pattern recognition... it's a fundamental component of animal/human intelligence, seems to me. I have, in the past, had, shall we say, temporary states of "excess pattern recognition." Since I knew the source of the phenom, I never let it worry me. (And when I closed my eyes, at times, I got cool, moving patterns very much like Persion rug designs/fractals... gave me new insight into the whole "flying carpet" concept, I'l tell you.) It also seemed to give me insight into the involuntary "excess pattern recognition" associated with acute schizophrenia... overdriving the pattern recognition part of the brain until you see interrelationships everywhere -- but not necessarily in a benign, cosmic way... more in a paranoid, they're out to get me way. It must be hell to be trapped in that... _______________ Anyhow, coming from "DXing" as a little kid (seeing how distant a radio station you could pick up), I was used to trying to make out the scratchy, tinny, distorted voices in AM radio broadcasts thousands of miles away (late at night when my folks were sleeping, I'd hook up our superhereodyne AM radio up to the huge TV antenna my dad had installed trying to transcend an entirely different kind of "ghost" and listen for distant stations. I got Cuba's English language broadcasts a few times (probably easier, since I think they were higher power) as well as frequently getting stations in Texas, Kentucky, and, once or twice, the upstate NY area. But you'd have to crank the sound way up and listen through mountains of crackly AM static -- not nearly as soothing as white noise, lemme tellya. _________________ But the REALLY weird "phantom noises" I used to hear regularly were when I was playing my 100 plus year old upright grand piano... like a lot of bozo, amateur keyboardists, I have a heavy foot on the sustain pedal... and it was a very loose, reverberant piano to begin with. Often, as I played my noodly arabesques, I would hear not-that-distant "conversations," hear what seemed like sirens -- and hear old-fashioned telephone ringers (all the phones in the house were electronic)... I'd stop playing, take my foot off the sustain pedal, and the phantom sounds would fade with the piano's reverberations. It was a very common experience that I simply came to accept. I don't think I've had the same experience with other pianos -- with the POSSIBLE exception of the beat up piano I used to play as a kid at my best friend's house. (And only one of the two hand-me-down pianos they had... the other never had the same magic for me... although it did have a piano roll reader that was pretty darn cool until my pal's little brothers broke it.) Anyhow... funny business.

 

 

Yeah, I've been hearing melodies buried in noise ever since I can remember - back to when I was maybe 1-1/2 or 2 years old.

 

Over the years the perceptual filters in my brainage have gotten used to filtering out that stuff when I want to - - years of meditation gave me practice at shutting off the various internal noise and music my brain... Except sometimes, after doing mixing or mastering work, I hear the music, precisely note-for-note and part-by-part, for maybe 14 hours afterwards. But that's what you get when you listen to the same songs a few hundred times in a row.

[veracohr]

This isn't me, but when I was a teenager my brother was in a marimba band. They called themselves Hearing Voices, because when they formed and started practicing, they would sometimes stop in the middle of a song because someone thought they heard people talking nearby. It was the buzzing of the resonator tubes making the noise.

[chipmcdonald]

Yeah.

 

My personal theory is that white noise is like dither. When you perceive it, anything non-aperiodic that occurs in your brain that *normally* would be in the "noise floor" of conciousness becomes apparent.

 

Lost memory of something on the edge of your awareness manifests itself as just enough neurons firing off to represent a pattern that's "recognizable".

 

Perhaps normally this process remains at the bottom of your awareness; the white noise "dither" makes it apparent.

 

When you're tired, you get more neurons popping off, so the effect is more pronounced in that case.

 

ON THE OTHER HAND

 

I'd be curious to know if the people that claim to have perceived this phenomenon (like myself) are only of the age where they remember going to bed with the tv on back in the day when tv stations stopped broadcasting at night.

 

Because I remember as a little kid falling asleep on the sofa with the tv turned down low, and awaking in a half-conscious state thinking "I'm I hearing Johnny Carson or is the station off...?"...

 

/ thinks too much anyhow

 

// MY theory, dammit, I don't want to read about this a few years from now from another source as a "new theory"!!!! Ahrggh....

 

/// also thinks noise allows very low levels of alpha/theta wave sound to be more effective than at "loud" volumes

 

//// another one of MY theories (dammit), is that any system that is sufficiently chaotic to overwhelm the mind's ability to intially perceive a pattern will in turn have an element of "beauty" related to it (ocean waves, waterfalls, fire, clouds); in turn we have audio effects that add "overwhelming compexity" to things (pitch and timbre oscillators that modify harmonic/melodic information)

[Outrider]

 

Originally posted by blue2blue (And when I closed my eyes, at times, I got cool, moving patterns very much like Persion rug designs/fractals... gave me new insight into the whole "flying carpet" concept, I'l tell you.)

 

 

Same here. I've always wondered if this happened to anybody else!

[Bucky Dude]

yup

 

I can't sleep without a fan running in the background

 

motorik

[Alndln2]

Originally posted by nat whilk II I've been in the habit of sleeping with a white noise source for a long time. But quite often while the white noise is going, I seem to hear music and/or voices - The voices are just like a quiet conversation at the other end of the house maybe coming very faintly through the ductwork or something. I never understand any actual words - the voices are never angry or anything - just placid, unintelligible, very faint.

Almost sounds like your describing EVP . They use white noise to hear voices from the spirit world supposedly.

[nat whilk II]

Eavesdropping on the spirit world? Gee, Home Depot should rename that fan I bought - call it maybe "Home Air Purifier and Portal to the Spirit World".

 

Maybe tack on a couple of bucks to the price, too, eh?

 

 

Is that dander of the dead I'm collecting in the filter? eayewwww...

 

 

nat whilk ii

[chipmcdonald]

 

Originally posted by Bucky Goldstein yup I can't sleep without a fan running in the background motorik

 

 

I don't like repetitive sounds. A fan annoys me. BUT... I bought a randomly oscillating fan that is pretty cool, except it stirs up dust and makes me have a headache...

 

I "sleep" really, really poorly. I probably have apnea, but the problem there is that I don't have insurance - and besides, why not prescribe a CPAP machine instead of bothering with a sleep study in the first place? Then, there's the problem of needing hours to fall asleep...

 

I sleep like a normal person at the beach, when I can hear the ocean (Myrtle Beach S.C. is the best) and have the light, alternating humidity-gusts of wind blowing through the room. I think even the occasionaly wall-unit hotel A.C. contributes a bit... That is the most relaxing environment, IMO.

 

The ocean sound (the *right* ocean sound..) must do something to my theta wave process I can't seem to reproduce. Recordings don't work, because I memorize the pattern, and despite elaborate "let's make it more ambient" tricks (speakers placed in other rooms, etc.) it still doesn't have the correct phase-dimensionality to effectively convince my brain to relax.

 

I've been this way since I was a kid: the *only* time/place I can sleep effectively would seem to be at Myrtle Beach.

 

"Why do you like going to Myrtle Beach?" people ask around here, because it's sort of commercialized and tacky... but I say "because I like how it sounds... and then I get that "Chip is crazy" look.... oh well.

 

/ needs an "off" switch

[Lynn Fuston]

In the 80s, I slept with a big window-unit air conditioner in the window by the bed. I often would hear what sounded like radio stations while laying there. They would stop when I turned off the A/C unit.

 

I do hear voices and music in white noise, fan noise. But I always thought it was like those faces you see when you look up at a stuccoed or popcorned ceiling. They look just like someone drew them even though you know they are completely random. And when you come back the next day you can't find them again. But you find new ones.

[chipmcdonald]

My washing machine has a "almost a vowel , but not" sound it makes, that if I'm distracted my brain wants to make it form into little sentence fragments.

 

It's very, very weird, I've caught myself standing there trying to pin-point the vowel sounds I'm *thinking* it's infering - but of course I can't.

 

sort of related, it occurs to me that back in the days you listened to vinyl records,

the music erupted forth from a wash of noise... and then faded into that noise.

 

So, everytime you listened, you exprienced a little moment of catharsis: are you hearing noise, or is the music loud enough yet? I can remember hearing songs fade with guitar solos on the tag, and the mind plays tricks on what you think you're hearing. A very mysterious process.

 

In fact, right now I'm imagining a guitar solo that for a moment, has a build up that has white noise that gets louder with it, as it becomes more involved - and then peters back out. I think that would be a curious experiment, I think it would yield an emotive effect that would be "different" but effective...

 

/ it also explains how bad guitar playing arises from noisy guitar rigs

[Sister Saviour]

I have a related topic to bring up. If I go to some of my louder friends band practices, they often crank it to the point of ridiculousness. I wear earplugs, but when I take them out and my ears start to overload I can heard other pieces of music that aren't being played. It's like my brain is filling in the bits that they aren't playing, and I've worked them out on guitar several times and given it to them as a lead part or whatever. It's cool, but doesn't seem to happen all the time. Maybe its just my brain having flashes of inspiration.

 

I've heard Kevin Sheilds from My Bloody Valentine (who were notoriously loud and white noisy in places) talk about the same effect before too.

[hankgoldman]

In my case, there was a repetitive phrase, ending in, "...theres a fire".   I also turned off the white noise machine and (thankfully) that voice stopped. I am a graphic artist with near perfect pitch and a family history of famous artists & musicians.... maybe that accounts for my OVER sensitivity?? any ideas?

[hankgoldman]

wow-- maybe THATS it! I was/am a Ham operator and did/do a LOT of DX-ing! Trying to hear what may or may NOT have been there! THANKS!!

[blue2blue]

---

veracohr wrote:

This isn't me, but when I was a teenager my brother was in a marimba band. They called themselves Hearing Voices, because when they formed and started practicing, they would sometimes stop in the middle of a song because someone thought they heard people talking nearby. It was the buzzing of the resonator tubes making the noise.

---

 

 

I was recently reacquainted with the relatively recent understanding (look hard enough and you can acutally find older physics/physilogy materials suggesting otherwise) that beat and difference tones  (aka "subjective tones") are not products of sound in air but rather appear fundamental to mechanical and/or neural processes in the human auditory system. 

Since doing that reading, I've been noticing 'difference tones' that create a low ghost tone, something I'd only noticed (after reading about it, I suspect) in passing.

And, being reacquainted with the idea that such difference tones were often used to simulate the very lowest pipes in pipe organ installations where space/money prevented the really big pipes, I've been thinking about that in terms of the DADGAD (minus a half) tuning that I often use these days.

 

 

 

[blue2blue]

---

Outrider wrote:

Originally posted by blue2blue (And when I closed my eyes, at times, I got cool, moving patterns very much like Persion rug designs/fractals... gave me new insight into the whole "flying carpet" concept, I'l tell you.)

 

 

 

Same here. I've always wondered if this happened to anybody else!

---

The whole notion of 'flying carpet' is presumably just a 'crusader' vulgarization of a term of art long ago applied to prayer and meditation rugs. (The fact that such ceremonial rugs exist in multiple cultures and often feature what the Indic culture calls 'yantras' -- visual meditation aids -- is also highly suggestive.)

I think I came across the equation of flying carpets and meditation rugs in Ralph Metzner's pan-cultural, interdisciplinary overview of consciousness expansion across the ages, Maps of Consciousness.

[blue2blue]

---

chipmcdonald wrote:

Originally posted by Bucky Goldstein yup I can't sleep without a fan running in the background motorik

 

 

 

I don't like repetitive sounds. A fan annoys me. BUT... I bought a randomly oscillating fan that is pretty cool, except it stirs up dust and makes me have a headache...

 

I "sleep" really, really poorly. I probably have apnea, but the problem there is that I don't have insurance - and besides, why not prescribe a CPAP machine instead of bothering with a sleep study in the first place? Then, there's the problem of

needing hours to fall asleep

...

 

I sleep like a normal person at the beach, when I can hear the ocean (Myrtle Beach S.C. is the best) and have the light, alternating humidity-gusts of wind blowing through the room. I think even the occasionaly wall-unit hotel A.C. contributes a bit... That is the most relaxing environment, IMO.

 

The ocean sound (the *right* ocean sound..) must do something to my theta wave process I can't seem to reproduce. Recordings don't work, because I memorize the pattern, and despite elaborate "let's make it more ambient" tricks (speakers placed in other rooms, etc.) it still doesn't have the correct phase-dimensionality to effectively convince my brain to relax.

 

I've been this way since I was a kid: the *only* time/place I can sleep effectively would seem to be at Myrtle Beach.

 

"Why do you like going to Myrtle Beach?" people ask around here, because it's sort of commercialized and tacky... but I say "because I like how it

sounds

... and then I get that "Chip is crazy" look.... oh well.

 

/ needs an "off" switch

---

I have apnea. 

I all but risk my life sleeping on my back, it seems. I used to love falling asleep supine (at the beach, in the park, at home listening to music) but now I have to prop up my head and back at a considerable angle or at some point presumably soon after falling into a deeper sleep, I'll choke on my own wacked out internal apparatus and wake somewhat violently. After falling asleep peacefully, it's a real drag. 

As a consequence, at night, I almost never let myself fall asleep on my back. 

[blue2blue]

---

Lynn Fuston wrote:

In the 80s, I slept with a big window-unit air conditioner in the window by the bed. I often would hear what sounded like radio stations while laying there. They would stop when I turned off the A/C unit.

 

I do hear voices and music in white noise, fan noise. But I always thought it was like those faces you see when you look up at a stuccoed or popcorned ceiling. They look just like someone drew them even though you know they are completely random. And when you come back the next day you can't find them again. But you find new ones.

---

 

 

Yeah, but the Land of Lakes Indian Maiden really does have some very nice knees.

 

http://www.anomalies-unlimited.com/Odd%20Pics3/LandOLakes.html

[rasputin1963]

 

Yes,  often when lying in bed at night,   surrounded just by very low-level household noises,  I'll often be convinced I hear speech.    Never music,   strangely.      Instead,  I hear what seems to be that hail-fellow-well-met,   overly confident baritone of one of those widget/appliance salesmen on TV.

 

But what is odd is that,   unlike a TV commercial,    the speaking does not pause or change.    Just a low-grade,  anchorman's mutter.     If I were a paranoid aluminum foil hat,     I might even think I was being fed auditory subliminals from some inimical body....   keeping us good,   compliant servants of The Matrix.

 

Who knows what this is.    Hey,   if cellphones deliver waves that cause whales, birds and honeybees to go koo-koo,     why I wouldn't be surprised if our own home environments were polluted by broadcasts which we can slightly detect.    Lucille Ball used to say that she once picked up AM radio from a new tooth-filling.

 

There are some "metaphysical appliance" stores online which claim to have machines that disperse unwanted waveforms from one's bedroom.

 

As I'm typing this,    I'm in a theater,  whose air-conditioner unit is producing a funny,   complex,   worried sinewave....that sounds exactly like an old phone dialtone.   "Baw-w-w-w-w-w-w-......."   Maybe human consciousness IS teleogenic:   always seeking to overlay Pattern upon the chaos....    something even newborns do.

[nat whilk II]

Interesting that someone bumped this old thread I started.

 

So here's an update on my experiences since the old thread was running:

 

> the phenomena pretty much dried up for maybe a year or so.  No idea why.  No changes in the bedroom apparati.   Lucid dreaming also very rare during same period (I have always had re-occurances of lucid dreaming since childhood.)

 

The "stuff I hear" has been returning, but different. No more classical music, no more soft radio-announcer placid voice, now I tend to hear odd yells and very faint (what I know are not) screams, as if the next-door neighbors are having a to-the-wall knock-down-drag-out.   It's not scary, unless I'm fooled at the first occurance, like hearing a startling noise. 

 

Why this weird change?  I'm not under any particularly greater stress - in fact I seem to be handling stress much better lately for some unguessable reason.  No big events or upsetting information or anything.  I'm going to lobby my brain for a return to the nice music, 'tho.....anyone know exactly how to do that?

 

Just as an aside - the most convincing noises - the ones that had me swearing to myself that there was really a radio on somewhere - were the ballgame announcer voices.  Just low enough that I couldn't understand what was being said except for an occasional tantalising single word, I would hear what sounded just like a ballgame being announced, with all the usual variations.  One voice would lilt along in that up & down speed and pitch and volume fashion that game callers use as their emotion tracks the action...and a second, more placidly "objective" voice (lower in pitch) would then "color comment" for a bit...then it sounded like the huge well of a cheering crowd, then loud scratchy music as it the station broke for a beer ad or something.

 

The first few times this happened, I would get up and search the house for that dang radio, even go outside to see if some neighbor had one going.

 

I do think there is link between this sort of thing and the artistic temperment.  Artistic types tend to report their creative activity as if they are watching some agent other than their own consciously directed minds "give" them ideas or "show" them stuff.  There's a definite pleasure sensation related to this experience of receiving or watching or listening to what is yourself, but an "other yourself" in a sense.  

 

Yes! I'm barking!!

 

nat whilk ii

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Beck]

For me its the opposite.  I've slept with a fan most of my life since I was a kid, but the times I don't and its very quiet I here the symphony in my head.  Well, I'm writing it piece by piece in my head and the only way I can shut that off and get some sleep is to switch on some kind of fan.  As for voices, I've only heard those when I took Benadryl for cold symptoms... so I don't take it anymore.