Posts Tagged ‘noise’

1. The sound of a hummingbird that can’t quite find the tune
2. Gentle rain falling on a corpse (Once they tell you that, you can’t get it out of your head)
3. William Shatner singing the Beatles “Why………Don’t-We-Do-It-in-the-Road”
4. A recorded loop of “Please listen carefully as some of our menu items have changed.”
   

   Q. What’s your favorite color noise?
   A. White.

5. Another recorded loop of “No, YOU listen carefully. Nobody in their right mind had any of your stupid menu items memorized in the first place.”
6. The sound of watermelons dropped from the Leaning Tower of Pisa
7. A recording of the men’s bathroom stalls at Taco Bell after a biker rally
8. Repeated sound of a cat scrambling to escape a bathtub with only 2 inches of water in it
9. A symphony of leaf blowers playing “YMCA”

Maybe this list should be retitled: Annoying Sounds Keeping Me Up at Night

Top 10 (or so) Least Popular “White Noise” Ambient Sounds

1. Rain falling on a corpse
2. An endless loop of “Please listen carefully as some of our menu options have changed”
3. Waves crashing on a Land Rover parked too close to the shore
4. Nail guns operated by the Marine Drum & Bugle Corps
5. Wind blowing through an orphanage
6. An endless loop of “If this is a medical emergency, please hang up and dial 911”
7. Morgan Freeman slowly enunciating, “Here kitty, kitty, kitty. Heeeeere kitty.”
8. A batter repeatedly hit on the ankle by a 95 mph fastball
9. A continuous sound of rubber being punctured by one of those “Caution: Severe Tire Damage” spikes.
10. The Gettysburg Address solemnly spoken in Pig Latin
11. A quartet of Leaf Blowers playing “When the Saints Go Marching In”
12. The sound of no hands clapping. AKA the Sound of Silence.
    

    Whatever get’s ya thru the night…It’s alright. It’s alright.

13. Christopher Walken reciting “Rock-a-Bye Baby”
14. The whoosh of toilets flushing
15. A 15-round recording of Rock’em Sock’em robots boxing
16. A veterinarian brushing Grover’s teeth. Grover is his assistant.
17. The zipping sounds of aestheticians administering a bikini wax

And if this list doesn’t put you to sleep, nothing will.

Celebrities trade on their famousness. It’s a commodity of recognition easily monetized courtesy of the endorsement market and the underlying calculus often plays out like this: “Me like that person. If me imitate, me become like them. Then happy.”

 

Now, let’s cut to the idea of where Ambien’s magic ends, and white noise sleep-inducing sounds begin. At the intersection of sleep aids and insomnia is where celebrities’ agents (who get 10% of their client spoils) see an opportunity to interpose their client’s good name between the desperate need for sleep and white background noises designed to promote glorious slumber. So an unlikely marketing scheme is hatched: White Background Noises created by celebrities for their adoring civilian fans. It’s a match made in Tinsel Town heaven. It’s a kind of fan fiction for the fatuous.

 

However well-intentioned this scam was, clinical sleep studies with zealous fans proved that not all celebrity white noises were found to be soporific. Far from the sleep-inducing mantras hoped for, some of these narcotizing sound bites, bit back and inadvertently activated the arousal response in sleepy males test subjects – especially when they heard a loop of sultry-voiced Angelina Jolie cooing “What are you wearing.” After this unintentional “ear porn” the sleep-deprived males perked right up and snoozing somehow didn’t seem so important. This and other streams of counterproductive white background noises were excluded from the app, but they can be heard on bootleg versions of the app found on YouTube.

 

So even though it’s 4 in the morning (in Darwin, Australia, not here in Reno where I am), I’m pleased to present:   

 

 

Top 10 Rejected White Noise Sleep Sounds created by celebrities for sleepless fans:

 

1. A loop of Tom Petty admitting to the people of Syria, “Well, maybe you do have to live like a refugee”

 

2. An endless loop of Steve Perry just singing the “Don’t Stop” part

 

2. Misty morning rain…bouncing off Tatum Channing’s abs or was it Channing Tatum’s pecs. Or maybe it was Carol Channing’s cheeks or Tatum O’Neal’s teeth. The point is it involved rain, a celebrity body part and it was rejected.
   

 

4. The continuous sound of Tim McGraw and Faith Hill’s boots knocking 

 

5. The repeated tooting of an “aah-oo-ga” horn…as blown by Monica Lewinsky

 

6. Morgan Freeman intoning, “My, my, my.” (Apparently the dissonance of a black man making white noise caused subjects to grow bewildered instead of sleepy.)

 

7. Yoko Ono imitating an air raid siren

 

8. The soothing and secretive “hiss” of Tom Brady deflating a football

 

9. The sound of Tina Turner privately dancing

 

10. Marcel Marceau miming the words to “The Sound of Silence”

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Background White noises designed to promote deep & restful sleep in the Loosely Wrapped

1. Endless loop of Oktoberfest Burping
2. A soothing recording of a woman continuously saying, “The Sandman will see you now.”
3. Repeated sound of a cat scrambling to get out of a bathtub with 2” of water in it
4. For the Zen sleeper: The sound of one hand clapping
5. Doppler-shifted instructions of a flight attendant screaming, “In the unlikely event of a water landing…”
6. A cacophony of very moist chewing
7. A succession of watermelons dropped from 7 stories
8. A succession of 7 stories dropped from a library
9. Cute kid mispronouncing the word library as “libary” – puts you right out (if you’re weird)
10. Ugly guy mispronouncing February as “Febuary”; and no I don’t know how you’d know he was ugly if it’s just an audio recording. I don’t even know whether or not he’s transgendered. This is just a stupid list I made up before bed, so give me a break before you get all judgey.
11. A guy saying over and over, “Y’know the app sucks, but the list is kinda funny.”

Good night everyone. Sleep tight, but not too tight.