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I have just experienced pink noise.

The library has installed four "pods" for group computing - think fancy cubes set up so that four or five people can sit there and collaborate on the computer. They look very hi-tech, with fake steel uprights and translucent walls, as a matter of fact, almost exactly like the rendered image of them, only taller and not as wide.

Anyway, as part of the hi-tech sexiness, they're equipped with pink-noise systems, which generate noise that's supposed to help with something somehow. I'm hazy on the exact application ebcause my quick Google search doesn't produce anything but pages telling me how to generate it, with no mention of why I'd want to generate it, other than testing audio systems, which I know is not the reason for installing it in the pods.

At any rate, pink noise sounds an awful lot like being in a room with a computer fan running.

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At any rate, pink noise sounds an awful lot like being in a room with a computer fan running.

Wow. I have a home office that generates an awful lot of pink noise and I didn't have to spend a penny for special "pods". *G*

You are obviously trendy, then! XD

Trendy, no. The intent was not to create the "pink noise". *G*

No - I just have an office with some antiquated computer/printing/networking equipment that all make loud fan noise.

1 - 12 port 10/100 full size rack mountable hub.
1 - Antiquated Laser Printer
2 - Computers with multiple fans
1 - Rack mountable switchbox

All of this in an itty-bitty living space. I've just got to figure something out about cooling for the summer for this room.

Heh. The pods are going to have computers and other equipment in them, too. I figure the students using them will have to shout at each other over the noise.

the intent, i think, is that it cancels the other ambient noise, or at lest muddles it, so that it's not disturbing...

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci213526,00.html

whether it works, hey... your call.

I'm not entirely sure it works, since it's summer and therefore there's almost nobody in that area of the library making noise, so no way of telling. :) The admin guy in charge of getting the pods is all happy because the pink-noise generator came with a remote control so he can play with it, but he can't figure out where in the pod he's supposed to stand to use it. Last I saw him, he was circling the pod and hitting the buttons on it, and occasionally it would turn off the noise, but he couldn't then figure out were to stand to turn it back on. There seemed to be no consistency there. :)

he should read the instructions. or look for an infrared port...

I think he's one of those people who think that to read the instructions would be to admit defeat. :)

i have a giant mallet with his name on it...

They need pink noise that can drown out corgies :/

Heehee. Get some of those overpriced Bose headphones and see if they work. XD

*twitches at the word 'overpriced'*

i so missed the "C" on the first read-thru of that...

Those are pesky too!

A mathy overview of pink/brown/other noise in a book I wouldn't necessarily have expected to find it in (being ignorant of such things, really) is Manfield (?) Schroeder's Fractals, Chaos, and Power Laws. That being said, it really is from a mathy perspective and is probably overkill. :-)

My attitude toward mathy is usually "Ooooo! Numbers!" *fingers in ears, la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la* I am very not good at numbers*, much to the despair of my math-teacher mother. I'm not a physicist now, even though I loved physics, because I couldn't hack the *math* involved. My brain isn't wired that way - chemistry was another class that was painful.** I think the physics worked because it's forgiving to people who can stand back and see patterns in things, while chemistry seems to require people who can memorize a bunch of facts and then apply those facts to work things out. I do significantly better in fields that work well with intuition.

* Well, for values of "not very good" that equal "managed to survive calculus with a C average in highschool, but it was extremely painful and I refused to take math in college" rather than "I didn't make it to algebra," or something like that.

** Due at least in part, I figured out later, to a really horrible teacher who thought that writing the lecture on overheads, putting them up and reading them as fast as possible to get through the lecture in one class period and then yelling at us when we couldn't keep up constituted "teaching."

*nod* It's all good. The book in question is AWOL/in storage or I'd attempt to demathify the explanation. ^_^

I am actually not that good at numbers per se, although I can do them. I think I started doing better when things switched to more conceptual math. Like when you're doing "prove the existence of element x with such-and-such property" even if you don't have a construction for what x is. (The beauty of math is abstraction, but I shall stop here. ^_^)

Joe had a physics prof who allegedly wrote and wiped the whiteboard at the speed of light. He said it was really, really, really annoying...

How is pink noise different from white noise? It has some red in it?

Pink noise is a variant of white noise. Pink noise is white noise that has been filtered to reduce the volume at each octave. This is done to compensate for the increase in the number of frequencies per octave. Each octave is reduced by 6 decibels, resulting in a noise sound wave that has equal energy at every octave.

If that means anything to you, you are a better man than I, Gunga Din.

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