Brown Noise

Brown noise falls at 6 dB per octave, putting most of its energy at the bottom of the spectrum. The name comes from Brownian motion, not the colour.

It resembles a distant waterfall or heavy surf heard through a wall, and it has become popular partly because it masks low-frequency intrusions - traffic, footfalls, machinery - that brighter noise leaves untouched.

Generated by integrating white noise; physically analogous to a random walk.

Commonly heard: Sleep and focus audio, tinnitus management, and as a low-end ingredient in sound design.

Stationary, patternless, heavily weighted to the low end.

Frequency profile: Power falls as 1/f squared - about 6 dB down per octave.

• Weight
• Enclosure
• Deep calm

Creative work

Adds body and a sense of scale under sparse material.

Relaxation

The gentlest of the common noise colours for most listeners.

Meditation

Very easy to stop noticing.

Focus

Strong on low-frequency masking; less effective against speech than pink noise.

Sleep

Popular for masking traffic and footsteps through walls and floors.

Paste any of these into the Studio, or adapt them. They are written to work with ElevenLabs Music and most other text-to-music tools.

• Deep brown noise bed with subtle slow modulation and a distant low drone
• Dark ambient sleep piece: brown noise, sub-bass swell, no melody, one hour feel

• The 'brown note' - an infrasonic frequency supposedly causing loss of bowel control - is an urban legend that has been tested and debunked on television.
• Because energy piles up at the bottom, brown noise can move a lot of air; small speakers simply cannot reproduce it.

• Sound therapy for tinnitus - evidence overview - Cochrane Library

Sources are listed so you can check them. Where evidence is preliminary or mixed, we say so on the page rather than in a footnote.

• Pink NoiseEqual energy per octave - the noise colour that sounds most natural to the ear.
• White NoiseEqual energy per hertz - the brightest of the noise colours, and the most clinical.
• WaterfallA continuous full-spectrum roar with real low-end weight - nature's own broadband noise.