Best ambient music for masking conversation

Factual Questions
1

The conversation is occurring on the other side of my window and I want to study.

I put this in FQ because I think there is at least a quasi-scientific answer to my inquiry. There are a number of companies producing white, pink, and other types of noise for workplaces after all.

Soma FM provides categories of ambient music (and other channels). Spotify has playlists. Some of this involves taste, but I want to get a better handle on the science of sound masking, specifically conversation masking.

Relevant: noise cancelling headphones do wonders for blocking airplane noise, but aren’t that great for blocking conversation. In cafes I’ve had a lot of success playing basically any kind of music with a headphone designed to muffle outside noise rather than let it through. That’s one solution, but I’m wondering whether about headset free approaches.

Bonus question: would pointing speakers at my window work? Internet says no, but I’m wondering.

Misread thread titles
2

I’ll bet video game designers have figured this out. See if you can find loops of ambient music from a non-action video game.

Maybe something like this?

3

Hmm, I make ambient music, but have never thought about using it for masking people talking. Now that I think about it, the traditional idea of ambient music might not work for that purpose at all. It’s usually recorded at low levels that aren’t going to cover up much unless you crank your playback to really high levels.

But drone music, specifically drone metal might do it. It’s recorded at all sorts of levels, but it’s mostly very loud. SUNN O))) are probably the masters of it. No drums, but plenty of texture provided by distorted guitars and feedback. It doesn’t require a lot of attention, but it is kind of hypnotizing.

4

Sorry, forgot to add this: Would just instrumental music work to cover up the conversation, but allow you to study?

5

I find the best for me is music with lyrics in a language I don’t understand. That way the human voices are mingled and my brain stops trying to discern the meaning. Otherwise nothing will stop the language section of my brain from switching back and forth from reading mode to listening mode when there are voices nearby.

6

Music to cut the world out and study to is personal.

I used to find loud rock and roll that I was totally familiar with was good. I didn’t listen to the words and it just flowed around me.

I do listen to a lot of ambient. The term covers a lot of ground. Brian Eno, Fripp and Eno, right up to dark stuff like Lustmord. I find a lot of this good for concentrating. But I don’t have an issue with external voices.

Blotting out nearby voices can be a problem. Our brains are so tuned to latch onto words that you might be better running interference on them. So stuff with vocals that you don’t try to listen to. Different language is one answer. Cocteau Twins comes to mind as an amusing option.

7

Probably not what you’re looking for, but I recently saw (in a true crime documentary) police questioning someone and, when they briefly left the room, they turned on a white noise machine so the person couldn’t hear the conversation they were having on the other side of the door.

8

In my experience, any kind of music works to varying extents. I have some audio questions though.

Should the music properly be tuned to frequencies similar to the human voice? Does a window filter out some frequencies more than others? Which ones? (Agreed, listening to foreign language music sounds like a good idea.)

Does pointing a speaker at the window disrupt the sound?

Which musical instrument is played at frequencies that most match the female human voice? Male human voice?

Drone music is bass-heavy, which is different than the human voice. Does that make it worse?

Noise apparently comes in different colors, including white, pink, brown, blue, and grey. Brown noise puts a greater weight on lower frequencies; grey noise tries to match human hearing. Which color makes the best mask?

One hypothesis: I’m barking up the wrong tree. Following Francis_Vaughan, the idea might be to interfere with our brain’s tendency to latch on to words, which means foreign language music might be the way to go. That and muffling, either architectural or with ear plugs and the like.

9

Remember: There are other types of ambience besides “music.”

I sometimes listen to many-hour-ed recordings of background (often “social” or “public”) ambience such as rainfall or New York City Ambience or “Shopping Mall Ambience” et al

There’s also this: any media you enjoy but not so much that it’ll distract you much (play it in the background); example: I’ll play hours-long videos of old Impractical Jokers episodes or the like, neutral, casual, inoffensive.

10

Why not consider one of those white noise generators instead? Personally I’d find ambient music distracting if I was trying to work.

I’m sensitive to noise when trying to sleep, and even a distant barking dog or kids playing can be disturbing when all else is silent. I have a white noise generator called a LectroFan EVO that I find very helpful. It’s a small dark grey octagon only a few inches high and about five inches across that has a dual repertoire of white noise sounds of different types and frequencies or different types of simulated fan sounds. Despite its small size it can generate low-frequency sounds if that’s your preference. My favourite sound is a low-frequency sound from the “fan” repertoire that resembles the dull drone in the interior of an old propeller-driven airliner.

Personal tastes vary but I find a constant white noise or fan-like sound soothing and easy to tune out as opposed to constantly varying sounds, even if designed as ambient music.

11

Human voices range generally from 75-4000 hz. That’s just a bit less than the tonal range of a piano. Above that it’s most sibilance and harmonics, which you don’t need to worry about. Below that, it’s more of a rumble or very low hum than an identifiable sound.

But overall I agree with the recommendation to use white sound, preferably a jumbled mix of frequencies rather than a pattern like music.

12

13

Tim Hecker is a great call. Lots noise in his style.

An Imaginary Country might a good album to try out.

Thinking about some works I find good to work to.

Any ambient with Bill Lazwell involved. Pete Namlook and Lazwell can be great. Outland (only one track on the whole album From the Earth to the Ceiling) might be interesting to try. There is a lot.

Pointing speakers at the window will just reflect back most of the sound from the speakers, and likely generate an unwelcome comb filtering effect depending upon distance to the window. Windows will transmit a surprisingly amount of bass, but become increasingly reflective as the frequency rises.

14

For nonexperts like myself, comb filtering is “..a phenomenon that happens when the same sound arrives at the listener’s ears (or a microphone) at different times with a very small delay between the signals.”

The unwanted sound (conversation) is coming through the window (and possibly through air gaps around it, though I’ve added some weatherstripping). The (ambient) music isn’t loud. Won’t this reflection effect deaden some of the sound coming in from the other side of the glass? Related: would bass frequencies disrupt the sound coming in from the other end more or less than higher frequencies?

15

For all useful purposes sound is additive. You can mix sounds together in the air, but if they are not correlated (which they won’t be) you just get the mixing of the sound.

If you want to disrupt sound you are talking about non-linear mixing and that means sound pressure levels that generally are a danger to health or life. You can perform some interesting tricks, but making the unwanted sound less annoying isn’t going to be one. (Non linear response of air in the ultrasonic is the basis of a neat trick that makes a sound source appear in mid air. You need very intense sources in the intersection region of the sound the air can be directly modulated to create audible sound it is spooky, very low-fi, and was being pedaled as a possible technology for audio reproduction without speakers. I haven’t heard of it in decades.)

Correlated sound is the basis for noise cancellation, where you need to emit a sound that exactly matches the sound you want to cancel but of opposite phase. In the local region you can cancel some sound. Inside headphones is the best answer. Any region larger and it gets arbitrarily hard.

One of the hard problems in audio is the huge range of wavelengths involved. 20Hz to 20kHz is a range of 17 metres to 1.7cm. Even in the vocal range you have your work cut out wrangling that.

16

I instantly thought: “Now, how did he know I’m a woman?!” ROFL!!

17

You either hate it and not be able to concentrate or you grab the groove and lose yourself:

18

The security sound generators I’m familiar with use “pink” noise. (See the link for info.) For a particular volume setting, “white” noise puts too much power into the higher frequencies, compared to human voices. The “pink” noise is closer to human sounds.

But I don’t think you need to buy a dedicated noise generator. Most people already have a music system and particular tastes in music. Play music you like that won’t distract you. That seems to be the general consensus.

19

I understand that spotify and youtube also have noise generators.

Helpful thread, ignorance fought. I was too focused on frequencies when the more important aspect was simple volume. That and personal taste and subjective level of distraction for various types of music.

The human voice covers a wide range of frequencies. Same for most musical instruments. This graphic disabused me of some of my preconceptions.

The red bars correspond to fundamental frequencies; the yellow are harmonics, the yellow bordered areas are overblow/breath/air. No, I’m not sure what that means but I was struck by the considerable overlap across most pairs of instruments.

Conventional wisdom has it that the cello best matches the human voice, but these authors are dubious.

And of those, some musical instruments1 may be more suited to resembling the sound of the singing human voice than others. For example, the cello has been claimed to be the instrument that best resembles the human voice (Juslin, Harmat, & Eerola, 2014, p. 604; Juslin & Västfjäll, 2008, p. 574). But what is the evidence for such a claim? Is it sufficient to base such an account on the assertion of a musician (as do Juslin et al., 2014, p. 619, who make reference to a statement by cellist Steven Isserlis about the cello being the instrument that sounds most like the human voice; see further, Isserlis, 2011)? In our review of the literature, we found no empirical evidence that explicitly tested what musical instrument sounds most like the human voice. However, given the apparent influence of the human voice upon instrumental music (as this review will further reveal) it was necessary to investigate the validity and roots of a conclusion such as “the cello is the most voice-like musical instrument”.

…The current literature review was not able to identify a single musical instrument or even a class/family of instruments that was consistently, and throughout history linked to being voicelike. Instead, voicelikeness may be another way of saying something positive about an instrument – what can be viewed as a top-down assessment rather than a bottom-up acoustical argument. If someone likes a musical instrument, they may say, in addition to liking the sound of the instrument, other things that embellish the generalised liking. One embellishment is to refer to the resemblance of the instrument to the human voice, and this comes about because historically, and possibly across numerous cultures and styles of music, the singing voice is seen as potentially the most perfect, superb musical instrument (e.g. Hirt, 2010, pp. 19–20)

Anyway, my speaker has been reoriented away from my window. Current musical choices include various playlists on Spotify, Hearts of Space, and Somafm.com. Also Radio Paradise and radio.garden.

20

I don’t hate it but I’d find it distracting as hell. I’d rather have the voices!

For me, I still say the white noise machine is the best option. It has about a dozen white noise choices in various noise “colours” and another dozen simulated fan noises in various frequency ranges, so one can select whichever sound does the best masking, and a volume control adjustable in 1 dB increments.