In a world with too many stimuli it is increasingly difficult to concentrate. In this post we will see how to listen to ambient sound in Ubuntu. We are referring to reproducing nature sounds, artificially generated noise or the sound of electrical devices on our equipment.
Of course, services like YouTube or Spotify are full of these types of sounds, but We know what their privacy practices are, so we're going to recommend some free alternatives.
Why it is good to listen to ambient sound
Many of us need to listen to background sounds to stay focused. According to experts, the reasons are as follows:
- Feeling of control: The listener has the power to decide what they hear since the reproduced sound acts as an "acoustic wall" blocking what comes from the street.
- Sensory anchor: SAccording to some studies, by concentrating a small part of your attention on something it is easier to concentrate the rest on something else.
- Reduction of stress and anxiety: Repetitive sound patterns such as the sound of a train or the sound of rain have a calming effect.
- Helps people with auditory processing disorders: Artificially reproduced ambient sound blocks external sounds that the affected person cannot block themselves.
- Helps people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD):By following a repetitive pattern, these types of sounds reduce the stimuli for distractions.
- Help people with autism: This type of sounds has calming effects in addition to blocking annoying noises.
- Cognitive stimulation: It has been proven that white noise or nature sounds improve cognitive activity and learning in addition to increasing creativity.
How to listen to ambient sound in Ubuntu
Of course, if you have a Spotify account, the easiest way is to use the official application in Snap format and search for some of the excellent playlists already put together. You can do the same from the browser if you have a YouTube Premium account or a good ad blocker. You can also try some alternatives like these:
Unfortunately . Anoise, which was a very good application for listening to ambient sound, seems to be no longer being updated.
Blanket
This application has a very well-made interface, a series of pre-established sounds and the possibility of adding our own. We can also continue listening to them with the application closed.
To play sounds we just have to move the slider to the desired volume. We can combine different sounds with different volumes.
The preset sounds are:
- Nature: Rain, storm, wind, waves, streams, birds and summer nights.
- Travels: Train, ship and city (They put it there).
- Noise: Pink noise and white noise.
We can install Blanket from the Flathub store with:
flatpak install flathub com.rafaelmardojai.Blanket
soundcape
This app is the complete opposite of Blanket. A very minimalist interface that requires some time to understand how it works. It starts minimized in the taskbar and you have to right-click to show the options. Bring a few examples of nature sounds like rain, thunder and rivers that you can combine using different volume variations. You can also play your own sounds.
The program is installed from the FlatHub store with the command:
flatpak install flathub io.github.ddanilov.soundscape
tenacity
We already spoke in previous articles of this Raudio editor that includes a noise generator. We just have to go to the menu Generate Noise. Next we choose the type of noise, the amplitude and the duration. Then we just have to save the file in our preferred format.
The types of noise available are:
- White noise: It includes all frequencies and emits them with the same intensity. It prevents other sounds from activating the cerebral cortex.
- Pink noise: Composed of random signal values with less frequency amplitude.
- Brown noise: Noise made up mostly of low frequency signals.
We can install Tenacity from the Flathub store with the command:
flatpak install flathub org.tenacityaudio.Tenacity