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Hear white, pink, brown, green, grey, blue and violet noise, and see how they differ. Free player, no ads.
White noise
No timer
Space plays or pauses. B toggles the black screen.
Wind down for sleep with guided deep rest. Wind Down for Bed is a free 10-minute guided session. Noise plays in the background; this one you follow.
Each colour is random noise. The name says how its power is spread from low pitches to high. Tap a colour to hear it in the player above. White, grey, blue and violet are set to about the same level. Deeper colours such as brown can sound quieter, so you may want a little more volume for them.
| Colour | How it sounds (our description) | The rule | Also called |
|---|---|---|---|
| A bright, even hiss | Flat: the same power at every frequency | ||
| Less hiss than white, more body | Falls about 3 dB per octave, so each octave carries the same power | ||
| A deep, low rumble | Falls about 6 dB per octave | Red noise | |
| A soft hiss centred on the middle pitches | No agreed definition. Ours is white noise with the middle, around 500 Hz, turned up | ||
Grey | Like white noise with more bass and a softer top | No standard definition. Shaped by an equal-loudness curve, so each pitch sounds about as loud as the others | |
Blue | A thin, bright hiss with almost no low end | Rises about 3 dB per octave | |
Violet | A sharp, very high hiss | Rises about 6 dB per octave | Purple noise |
Nothing to playBlack | Silence, or close to it | Two meanings: silence, or a spectrum that falls faster than brown's 6 dB per octave |
Slopes for white, pink, red (brown), blue and violet: Zhivomirov 2018, Table 1, which also lists black noise as falling faster than 6 dB per octave. Every sound here is made in your browser, not recorded.
All three are random noise. What changes is the balance of low and high pitches. White noise has the same power at every frequency, and most of the frequencies you can hear are high ones, so it comes across as a hiss. Pink noise tilts that balance down by about 3 dB an octave, so you hear less hiss and more body. Brown noise tilts it twice as steeply, about 6 dB an octave, so the low end takes over and it sounds like a deep rumble.
Play them one after another in the chart above. The difference is easier to hear on headphones than on a phone speaker. For the long comparison, read brown noise vs white noise.
There is no good evidence that one colour is better for sleep, so pick the one you stop noticing.
More on this: white noise for sleep, and brown noise for sleep.
Turn it up only until it covers the sounds that bother you. You should still be able to talk over it. For sleep, stay under 50 dB and treat that as a ceiling, not a target. Put the phone across the room, not by your head, and set the sleep timer so the sound fades out instead of playing all night. Blue and violet are mostly high pitches, so start them low.
Long or repeated exposure at 85 dBA or more can cause hearing loss. If you have tinnitus or any hearing problem, ask your GP or an audiologist before playing noise through the night.
Names for random noise with different balances of low and high pitches. White, pink and brown follow a fixed rule for how power changes with pitch, and blue and violet are the same rules turned upwards. Green and grey are looser labels with no single agreed definition. Black noise means silence, or close to it.
Noise shaped by an equal-loudness curve, so low, middle and high pitches sound about equally loud. Ears hear the middle best, so grey noise turns the bass up and takes a little out of the middle. There is no single standard version. Ours follows a gentler version of the usual curve, with less of the deepest bass.
Noise whose power rises about 3 dB per octave, the opposite tilt to pink. It is mostly high pitches: a thin hiss with little low end. Violet noise rises twice as steeply.
We'd describe the brown noise here as a deep, steady rumble, a bit like a distant waterfall or a river. The name comes from Brownian motion, the random movement of particles named after the botanist Robert Brown, not from the colour.
Not here. One colour plays at a time, and switching fades from one to the next. You can add rain or another soundscape on top of any colour.
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