It's the craziest thing I've ever heard of. Blackhole's OS X Noise app generates different types of noise that it promises will "drown out annoying roommates and co-workers today!". Well, of course I was interested, so I went ahead and downloaded it.

(Those of you PC and Linux users out there, you're not left out either. There's a Wikipedia page that generates pink noise just like this app does.)

It happened to be a PowerPC build, so to get maximum performance on my MacBook (I HATE Rosetta), I used the included source code to build my own universal binary. It went fairly well, building in less than a minute.

Now for the testing. I turned it on, wondering what I was going to hear, and I heard the wonderful, clear sound of... static. It sounded like regular static. I then decided to change it from its default of Pink Noise to White Noise. Yay, a different kind of static!

It felt no different than if I were to turn on my TV or radio and tune into some random station. It did not sound amazing. I know it's generated using a very special algorithm, but it just did not blow me away.

Of course, I knew that this was not the point. The original goal was, of course, to cancel out annoying noise. Since I use my computer in a fairly quiet environment, I couldn't really test a real-life situation. So then I turned on some annoying music on my stereo, and then let the static run.

The result? It tuned out the music fairly well, allowing me to better concentrate on what I was doing (blogging). This program does do what it's supposed to, I'll give credit for that. But the amount of noise required to drown out the offending noise was so much, it really wasn't worth it.

I then decided to set my radio tuner to some random spot. Amazing, the result was almost identical! So although this program is an effective noise-generator, it's certainly not the end-all program, and using static to drown out noise has been available to us since the radio was invented.