Monday, October 29, 2012

Boring Enough to Sleep To

Let's see if this works. It required a fairly crazy amount of cutting and pasting in the tag salad that YouTube provides: that was much more painful than making a sound, getting a half-minute of it, fading it in and out, then adding a picture to it to make sure YouTube would take it, then exporting it to a format YouTube would take, then uploading it.

The deal is I was always impressed with the Hunter S. Thompson trick of turning the TV channel - remember turning the things? - in between stations to get white noise to sleep to. The thing is that while white noise provides a lot of sound cover, it's the same sound from moment to moment, and if you're in the insomniac way then your mind is racing. If you use some hippie-style synth drones, though, the sound can get to this happy balance between enough variance to be distracting but not quite enough variance to be rousing.

Lately I've been letting this go all night: it's around Hallowe'en and here that means fireworks season. Not that we take anything away from The Lovely Daughter's ability to make crashing noises.











Neato! Works fine. They're all timed a little bit differently so once they get out of phase they shouldn't line up again for...too much math. Plus there are bound to be load-time issues.

8 comments:

Smut Clyde said...

They're all timed a little bit differently so once they get out of phase they shouldn't line up again for...too much math.

Sam Beckett figured out that trick with the Frog Chorus in Watt, decades before Eno latched onto it.

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

I have a small fan (made of metal!) I bought freshman year of college.

It still works, and serves this very purpose. Especially now that there are some very noise people next door.
~

zombie rotten mcdonald said...

I have always relied on alcohol.

Substance McGravitas said...

The problem with that is you wake up in the morning looking for more alcohol and it's GONE.

Substance McGravitas said...

Sam Beckett figured out that trick with the Frog Chorus in Watt, decades before Eno latched onto it.

Polyrhythms are a natural variance trick, especially for showoffs who nevertheless want to cut corners. Piano jerkoffs just love to conquer pieces where left and right hands are dealing with different rhythms.

Somewhere out there is a video of, I think, Jack Irons of the Red Hot Chili Peppers listening to the noises in his kitchen and drumming along (sans kit) to the opposing rhythms of fridge and clock and whatever else.

zombie rotten mcdonald said...

The problem with that is you wake up in the morning looking for more alcohol and it's GONE.


I KNOW.

Smut Clyde said...

you wake up in the morning looking for more alcohol and it's GONE.

MIKEY STOLE IT.

M. Bouffant said...

A friend (now sober 20+ yrs.) used to get himself a pint (actually 350 ml.) of vodka for his evening festivities, & then drink 'til blackout. Some mornings he would find a second empty pint (GONE!) meaning he had driven to the likker store for pint #2 in blackout mode. You just can't win.