blog o' sphere

A friend of mine (hi K!) revealed to me recently that he uses a "background noise" app, and that he had some strange observations. He could hear patterns in the noise, right at the edge of audibility.

I was skeptical. Humans are notorious for imagining patterns everywhere: it's how we're wired. What other explanations could there be, if he wasn't just making it up?¹ Perhaps the app was using a poor random number generator? Not exactly: further investigation revealed the surprising fact that the patterns seemed periodic—every 30 seconds to be precise—and it wasn't long from there until the discovery that yes, the app simply uses prerecorded segments of noise, and yes, they're exactly 30 seconds long.

This both astounded and disturbed me. That someone could detect long-range periodicity in randomness by ear was pretty neat. That someone would make an app that explicitly stored 5 megabytes of random data and played it back in a loop instead of writing a dozen lines of code was just depressing², especially as it defeated the entire point (the supposed soothing properties of the noise were demonstrably being eroded by distracting patterns).

Since the app offered various colours of noise I found myself idly wondering how to generate them algorithmically, then idly playing about, and before I'd quite realised what I was doing I'd somehow written an app of my own.

Rainbow Noise offers six varieties of mathematically-well-defined noise. It also contains an easter egg. More accurately, it is an easter egg that just happens to contain a noise generator. Since bloating a simple app by over an order of magnitude just for the lulz is crazy (not to mention that unnecessary bloat was one of the motivating factors behind this in the first place), I have gone to some effort to keep the size down.³

Sadly the egg does not yet work in Chrome. Given the pathological loathing of legally-unencumbered codecs apparently shared by Apple and Microsoft, it doesn't work in Safari or IE either, but at least Google has acknowledged the problem. So maybe hooray for Google but definitely hooray for Firefox, where everything just works. (Why no, I will not be working around this bug.)

Code is on github.

[1] Presumably subconsciously, but you never know.

[2] Apparently randomness as a service is a thing these days. The notion that entropy is sufficiently hard to come by that you would ever need to look to a third party to provide you with some—and any would-be cryptographers who think this is a good idea should be beaten to death with their own S-boxes—is one of the dafter things I've ever heard. But not, perhaps, as daft as having a fixed entropy pool and outputting it verbatim over and over again.

[3] Not all-out. Some.