Ambient Mixer, Listen To, Create Ambient Sounds
I recently began to take a closer look at ambient sounds and noise colors, e.g. white noise, to improve my sleep. I personally do not sleep that well which can be mainly attributed to working in front of a computer monitor all day, and to my sensitive hearing. To make matters worse, I live in a place where it is never really quiet. You hear cars, planes and other annoying sounds at night, and school kids, people with dogs and other noises early in the morning.
My basic idea is to overshadow those unpleasant noises and sounds with pleasant ones.
Ambient Mixer now is an online service where users can listen to ambient sound from other users or create their own relaxing sounds. It is free to listen to other user's sounds, while the creation of custom atmospheric sounds requires an account.
A custom ambient song consists of up to eight different sound samples that you can combine. A click on Load next to each channel opens a menu with sound categories. Included here are effects, nature sounds, transport, human or unreal ambiances to name a few. You usually encounter a number of sub-groups when you select a main group. The nature category for instance is split into the four groups Animals, Musical Instruments, Other, Weather and Water.
Each channel comes with its own volume control and other settings. It is for instance possible to make a channel random so that its sound loop is only played a specific amount of times per minute, ten minutes or hour.
If there is a downside to the service it is the fact that downloading music to your PC is not free. You have to pay between $5 and $16 depending on the length of the audio that you want.
It is possible to bypass this with sound recorders but it may not be legal in the country you are living in. It is however possible to listen to the songs online. This however is not applicable for me, considering that I do not want to hear my PC running in the background while trying to sleep. While it is almost silent, it is still noticeable.
Users who just want to listen can pick a popular composition on the main page or use the Ambient categories to find something that they like to listen to.
You can check out Ambient Mixer here.
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I’ve recently started getting ringing in my ears 24/7; as it turned out, it is tinnitus. The doc said to use sound therapy to help tune it out and such, so I started looking around the net for what’s available. This site you mention here is really fantastic, love the way it is set up and it works well. There are some other similar sites if you want to check out what’s out there, such as RainyMood, ZenDesk’s Buddha Machine, and SimplyNoise. A Google search on each of these should get you to them.
I still have to find the perfect sound that puts me to sleep right away. I bought some mp3s at Amazon.com and while they are cheap (at less than a Dollar for a full album), they have not yet contained a piece that I really liked. Tinnitus is really bad, I know because my mom has it.
I use stuff like this to assist me in creating a better work environment but not for sleeping.
If your hearing is as sensitive as you say it is, then I’d suggest inviting technology to leave your quest for sleep help. It’s just a big mess. Unless you’re going to invest in a high end reproduction system with bit perfect signal transports, full range speakers, low noise electricity sources, and lossless audio formats, then you’re just going to make things much worse for yourself.
Go acoustic. In the summer, some windchimes hung indoors being blown by an oscillating fan is a very soothing experience. I have an expensive burlwood box called “rain bell chimesâ€, which is basically a box that you flip upside down, the little balls inside get stuck to its ceiling, and then as they fall off they clang against one of three little chimes inide. It can go for about 20 minutes, and I’m usually asleep well within that time. There are lots of other little things like that too, but I really would recommend not using technology for this.
I never thought about going acoustic, good idea. Then again, the noise a fan makes would irritate the hell out of me.
I like ambient sounds when I’m working. For sleep, I just use melatonin. :)
6 years ago I had horrible tinnitus. I got a small sound generator from Radio Shack; played white noise, rain, babbling brook. Used w/ headphones it helped me sleep.I got on hypertensive meds & the ringing lessened considerably–so get your BP checked!! You don’t want this condition!
I always sleep w/ a fan when the weather is warm. Winters, I have a hard time falling asleep without it at times.
Oh, yes… right… I forgot to mention that in my earlier posting. Good work, Mike.
Yes… tinnitus can be (but isn’t necessarily always) a symptom of hypertension… high blood pressure. High blood sugar can also (though somewhat more rarely) cause it. Definitely get both your blood pressure and blood sugar tested, Matt. Definitely.
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Gregg L. DesElms
Napa, California USA
gregg at greggdeselms dot com
In fact you CAN download sounds (tracks) from there as mp3-s, but than you have to mix them yourself :)