Ever since two step-granddaughters came into my life I have become very familiar with the concept of white noise. Emanating from a tiny amplifier in each child’s bedroom, the sounds of fizzling static are something I now immediately associate with a quiet night. I’d always thought white noise was somehow reproducing the sounds a baby would hear while still in their mother’s womb, hence the wonderfully calming effect it had on our wee ones. It seems it’s a bit more complicated than that.

A photo taken across the lake at our cottage on the Bruce Peninsula.

What makes white noise so effective as a kind of aural blanket is that it’s a broadband sound made up of all audible frequencies. And white noise isn’t the only “noise” out there. Scientists, psychiatrists, and wonderful people who know about such things have identified brown, pink, red, blue, gray and violet noise as well. I had to know more.

“Can Brown Noise Turn Off Your Brain” is a terrific interactive article on the New York Times website that offers a great introduction to all these noises and how they can appeal to people. I won’t go into the various definitions of each noise here. It’s all a bit beyond me, actually. What I can grasp is that each type of noise is some variation on a blending of higher and/or lower frequencies at a variety of volumes. The point of these noises is that listening to one of them can be quite pleasant (though not to everyone), relieving stress and inducing sleep. Evidently. these noises have been championed all over social media for their various perceived benefits. Spotify even has over seven hours of this stuff. (Yes, I am totally showing my age with that last statement.)

After spending many a granddaughter’s nap-time in awe of the power of white noise, it’s brown noise that has me intrigued, however. That’s because brown noise is the one noise that’s actually not named after a colour but after a person–Robert Brown, a Scottish botanist. He discovered “Brownian motion”, originally seen as the movement of pollen grains suspended in water and later used to describe diffusion, such as the diffusion of pollutants through the atmosphere or the diffusion of calcium through living bone tissue. Brown noise is supposed to mimic that random but progressive motion with a particular kind of static that’s perceived as deeper than white noise and is said to induce a complete quieting of the mind.

I remember studying diffusion while taking a course in botany. Diffusion is a crucial process in the mechanics of green, growing things but it’s also the magic that happens when the scent of one beautiful lily fills a room on a dark, cold winter’s night.

Tonight, I hope you have the luck and the luxury of experiencing a moment of stillness and silence, the kind of quietude from which spark the glimmerings of peace, hope and joy.

Merry Christmas, everyone.