White Noise vs Pink Noise vs Red Noise Which is the best?
White Noise vs Pink Noise vs Red Noise Which is the best for masking unwanted noise?
Being very sensitive to noise coming from the street and neighbors I use a lot of masking background sounds like wind, little creek, rain and one of the most popular solutions namely white noise.
White noise has a completely random energy across the whole frequency spectrum spread out portions of sound waves.
Masking unwanted noise
Here comes the effect of masking in place, those random frequencies even at a low level can just overlay the annoying noises that keeps you distracted and because of its continuity your brain gets use to it and won’t alert you any more by all these subtle noise events coming from outside.
In this state of adaption your hearing and attention is soothed by the lulling cloud of background sounds.
The downside of the white noise linearity is that our hearing is more sensitive to higher frequencies which can be very unpleasant in a long term.
Why pink noise?
Fortunately there is a filtered version „pink noise“ where the high frequencies has less power than white noise, I find this version the perfect solution.
Try it out for your self, you’ll be surprised how effective this simple solution can be.
For best results please make sure your sound system is capable of reproducing the widest range of frequencies possible. In other words laptop speakers for instance won’t work at all.
Deep Red Noise
If you are sensitive to low frequency noises such passing traffic or neighbors foot steps, the deep red noise can help you just fine.
The deep red noise has its most energy on the very low range and is a perfect background noise to mask the unwanted noises in that range.
To have the best result and experience you wan't to play the deep red noise on a sound system that can actually reproduce those low frequencies.
If you have a subwoofer based sound system you're good to go.
