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.