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'white noise' sound files to reduce distraction?

Hello. I am looking for sound files of things like rain, water, etc, that can be played on ipod gapless and make a continuous relaxing background noise, to use in combination with my noise-reduction headphones. (Music works, of course, but that's distracting, too.)

I've poked around on the web, but all my google searches have brought me to junky websites that are badly organized and trying to sell me overpriced sound-effect CDs for movies and stuff, which isn't really what I'm looking for. There must be some people out there who just recorded rain and put it on the web, yeah?

Anyone?

Berko's picture

You might also like classical...

ggrozier;8667 wrote:
You might also like classical guitar or lute, and baroque music (instrumental, not the songs).

For order and structure, you would be better off with music from the Classical period (not to be confused with the generic "classical" music by which people generally mean "cultivated" music as opposed to "vulgar" or "vernacular" music) such as Mozart, Haydn and early Beethoven to name some big names. If you are drawn toward the Baroque period, CPE Bach is a good bridge between the Baroque and Classical periods. The most effective are going to be the pieces or movements with the most structure so look for rondos and first and last movements of sonatas, particularly solo piano sonatas. (The first and last movements are usually the most structured, being either in sonata-allegro or five- or seven-part rondo form.) If you like chamber music, piano trios and string quartets and quintets can be nice too. I would steer clear of concerti as the change in instrumentation from orchestra to solo play is distracting to me.

If you are interested in less tonal music, dodecaphonic/12-tone pieces and pieces such as Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste offer some of the most rigidly imposed structure for music. It isn't tonal in the traditional sense of the word, so it could be rough on the ears. It might help to read an analysis if you are in any way familiar with music theory.

Since the key is the actual musical form of the piece or movement, it can be difficult to track down the best stuff but you should be able to compile a good list of tracks over the next several weeks.

Quote:
As the parent of a college student, I've learned that there's software that lets you capture streaming audio, but don't know what it's called.

Audio Hijack can do this or iFill from Griffin can do it as well.

 
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