A few days ago Emalyse posted a helpful article about dealing with Tinnitus, reminding me that my impending travel is going to need to take my Tinnitus into account.  I rarely spend time away from home, but whenever I do, I inevitably forget to bring a fan or something to create a Tinnitus-masking bed of white noise to help me fall asleep.  The phrase “silence is deafening” is one which Tinnitus sufferers are all too familiar.  Bringing a fan halfway around the world seems

In any case, after failing to get the Linux white noise generator software to which she linked in her article functioning, I decided to see what I could do on my own.  I fired up Audacity and quickly found that it can generate white noise and pink noise.  Not really knowing which one would be better for sleeping, I went about generating 8 solid hours of each, and loading the resultant ogg files onto my iPod.  (Lame was estimating that it’d take over 2 hours to encode this mono audio file to MP3, so I opted for ogg since oggenc only took 40 minutes to encode the same file.)  Now I’ll be able to pop on my light-and-comfy overly expensive Bose headphones while on the plane, drowning out all the screaming children, all the whining children, all the arguing children and all the cries of “oh my God, if you don’t shut those children up I’m opening the emergency door and letting them get sucked out.”

If we actually arrive in Australia — and survive the Sydney Harbor Bridge Climb that D’s new employers have scheduled for us shortly after our arrival — to find that our hotel is too quiet, I can simply plug my iPod into my OLPC XO and let it play my soothing white/pink noise aloud whilst we sleep the sleep of someone who has traveled halfway around the world in a tiny box to find that it is now two days later than when they left.  I really wish I had thought to do this years ago.  Thanks, Em, for planting the idea in my head.  My sanity thanks you as well.

If you find yourself in need of large continuous stretches of white/pink noise, I’ve handily provided the generated files below for your listening pleasure.  If you don’t suffer from Tinnitus, however, I recommend that you don’t try sleeping with white noise; it very quickly becomes addicting.  D does not suffer from Tinnitus, but she is now unable to sleep without my white noise’s comforting silence either.  Use at your own risk.

8 hours of white noise (ogg format 239 MB), 8 hours of pink noise (ogg format 233 MB)

(Apologies for not making these available in non-hacked iPod-compatible formats.  When I get back I’ll rectify the situation.  Also, you might think it’s a bit nutty to generate 8 hours of noise rather than just looping a shorter length.  Yes.  You are right.  I just worry that my brain will detect the looping and listen for it, thus keeping me awake.  I used to have an “ocean sounds” cd that I couldn’t listen to after a while because my brain knew when particular waves would come in, and would actively listen for them.  Stupid brain.)