NoiseHaven FAQ

A1: A free white noise generator and sleep sound mixer in your browser. It has five tabs: Mix (35 sounds to combine and place around you), Sleep (a fading timer, a gentle alarm, a breathing guide and a sleep diary), Focus (work rounds with breaks), Tones (brainwave beats and sounds shaped around tinnitus) and Saved (your mixes and a backup file).

A2: It is free and there is no account or registration. Like every page on ZeroDataUpload, it is supported by advertising.

A3: No. Every sound is made on your device, and your mixes, diary and focus times are kept in this browser. The page itself, its ads and its analytics load from the internet as on any website, but what you play and save is never sent with them.

A4: Current versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari on computers and phones. The sounds need the browser's audio processing, which every current browser has; a very old browser shows a note that it cannot make the sounds.

A5: Browsers allow a page to make sound only after you tap or click on it, and NoiseHaven never starts sound by itself when the page opens. Pick a sound or a ready-made mix, or press Play.

A6: Yes. Tab reaches every button and slider, the arrow keys move along each group of choices and move the chosen sound on the stage, and while you use the tool Space plays or pauses, B opens the bedside screen and Escape closes a window.

A7: No. Each sound is made live from a small model of the real thing: raindrops, bubbles in a stream, waves breaking, bird songs, crackles of a fire, the clack of train wheels, the strings of a tanpura. There is a little chance in every model, so nothing loops and an hour of rain never repeats itself.

A8: White noise has the same energy at every pitch and sounds like a bright hiss. Pink noise falls by 3 decibels an octave, so every octave carries the same energy; it sounds softer, like steady rain. Brown noise falls by 6 decibels an octave and sounds deep. Grey noise is shaped so every pitch sounds about as loud, green centres on the middle pitches, blue and violet rise with pitch, and deep brown has the hiss taken out.

A9: Up to eight at once. Each has its own volume and mute, and the arrow on its row opens more settings: the sound's own controls (how hard the rain falls, how rough the sea is, the speed of the fan, the key of the tanpura), its tone, its direction and distance, and whether it drifts.

A10: A round room seen from above with you in the middle, facing up. Each sound is a coloured dot: drag it to the left or right to hear it from that side, or further out to make it quieter and more distant. With the stage selected, Enter picks the next sound and the arrow keys move it. Headphones make the places clearest.

A11: Each sound moves a little from side to side and swells and settles slowly, on its own slow rhythm, so a mix sounds more like a real place. The dots on the stage follow where the sounds are.

A12: Twelve starting points, such as Rainy night in, Storm in a tent, Monsoon evening, Forest stream, Night train, Deep focus, Temple at dawn and Baby sleep. Each is an ordinary mix you can change; the label says what it is often used for.

A13: Many people find that a steady sound helps them fall asleep, mostly because it covers sudden noises. The research is not settled: a 2021 review of 38 studies rated the evidence that steady noise improves sleep as very low quality (Riedy and others, Sleep Medicine Reviews). Treat it as something to try, keep it quiet, and see a doctor about sleep problems that go on.

A14: Just loud enough to cover what keeps you awake, softer than a conversation, and lower still through headphones. For a baby, a study of infant sleep machines advised keeping the sound as far from the baby as you can, never in or on the cot, as quiet as works and for a short time (Hugh and others, Pediatrics 2014).

A15: Choose 15 minutes to 3 hours, or a time on the clock, and how slowly the sound should fade (10 seconds to 15 minutes). At the end it stops, or keeps playing quietly if you choose that. 15 min more adds time and brings the volume back up.

A16: Set a time and what to wake to: your mix, birdsong with a stream, singing bowls, wind chimes, ocean waves or a tanpura. The sound rises from silence over 1 to 15 minutes, and if you have not stopped it, a soft bell rings every half minute after the rise. Snooze waits 5, 9 or 15 minutes.

A17: No: it rings only while this page stays open. Leave a phone on its charger with the bedside screen showing, and keep your phone's own alarm as a backup. If the device slept and the alarm is found up to ten minutes late, it rings and says how late; later than that, it says the alarm was missed instead of ringing hours late.

A18: The alarm and the timer use your device's clock. On the night the clocks go forward, an alarm set inside the skipped hour rings when the clocks jump; on the night they go back, an alarm in the repeated hour rings the first time that time comes.

A19: A dark full-screen clock with your mix and the timer, dimmed to one of three levels in white, amber or red. The buttons hide after a few seconds; tap to bring them back. Keep the screen on asks the browser to stop the screen sleeping while it is open.

A20: Each time you listen for 10 minutes or more, the time and the sounds are noted. In the morning the Sleep tab asks how you slept the night before. Once you have rated a few nights, Your ratings by sound shows your average rating on nights each sound played. It shows what went with your better nights, not what caused them.

A21: Work for 25, 50 or 90 minutes or your own length, then take a short break; after a set number of rounds the break is longer. Your mix plays while you work and, as you choose, pauses, keeps playing or changes to another mix in the breaks. A soft bell marks each part, and Time focused shows your minutes for the last seven days.

A22: Prana Breathing Exercises teaches fifteen breathing techniques in depth, and the Clock has alarms, a countdown, a stopwatch and a world clock. NoiseHaven is a sound mixer first: its alarm wakes you with its own sounds rising from silence, its timer fades your mix out, and its short breathing guide lets the sound swell and settle with your breath.

A23: Two tones a few hertz apart. Binaural plays one in each ear, so the beat is heard inside the head (headphones needed); monaural mixes them so the beat is in the sound; isochronic is one tone pulsing on and off. You choose the beat from 0.5 to 40 hertz and the pitch of the tone, or a journey that moves the beat slowly over 15 to 30 minutes.

A24: It is not settled. A 2023 review of 14 studies found 5 in which brain rhythm followed the beat and 8 in which it did not (Ingendoh and others, PLoS ONE). The names on the presets (Delta, Theta, Alpha, Beta, Gamma) are the bands of brain rhythm the beat falls in, not a promise of what it does. They are not a treatment; do not use them while driving, and ask your doctor first if you have epilepsy.

A25: First you find the pitch of your ringing with a tone, in one ear or both, using small steps or a whole octave. Then you can add notched noise (soft noise with that pitch taken out, half an octave or an octave wide) or a covering band (a narrow band of noise at that pitch) to your mix.

A26: It is not a treatment. A small trial of music shaped with the ringing's pitch taken out found the ringing rated quieter after a year (Okamoto and others, PNAS 2010); a larger trial found no clear change on its main measures after three months (Stein and others, BMC Neurology 2016). Keep the sound a little quieter than your ringing, and see a doctor if your tinnitus is new, in one ear only, beats with your pulse, or comes with hearing loss or dizziness.

A27: Save keeps a mix in this browser (up to 100). Share makes a link that opens the same mix on any device; the person who opens it presses Play it. Sound file makes a WAV file of 1, 3 or 10 minutes that loops with no seam, to play on repeat in any music player.

A28: On the Saved tab, Save a backup file downloads your mixes, sleep diary and focus times as a file. Restore from a backup adds them back on any device; mixes and nights already there are kept, and every value in the file is checked before it is used.

A29: Your current mix, saved mixes, settings, sleep diary and focus times, under this tool's own name. Nothing is written until you change something. To remove it, delete this site's data in your browser settings; other tools on the site keep theirs.

A30: Some phones, iPhones in particular, pause sound from web pages when the screen locks. Under Sleep, Keep playing when the screen is off records your mix as a two-minute seamless loop that the phone plays like music. Changes to the mix are heard after you record it again.