Pink noise

Pink noise loses half its energy with every octave — a fall of about 3 dB per octave — so the shrill top end of white noise recedes and what is left sounds like steady rain, wind in trees, or a waterfall heard from another room. The player below starts with pure pink; blend in brown for more depth or white for more edge.

Press play for pure pink noise — white noise through Kellet's filter, generated live. Add brown below it for a deeper floor.

White 0%

Pink 85%

Brown 0%

Volume 80%

Sleep timer

No timer set — playback continues until you pause it. With a timer, the sound fades out gradually at the end instead of cutting off.

Volume first: pink noise feels gentle, which makes it easy to leave too loud. Set it just high enough to soften the sounds that bother you, and no higher — long listening at high volume can damage hearing whatever the color.

What "pink" means: −3 dB per octave

Idealised spectra. Each octave up, pink noise carries half the power of the one before — which matches how hearing divides the spectrum, so it sounds balanced.

Pink noise is defined by equal energy per octave rather than per hertz. Because each octave spans twice the bandwidth of the previous one, holding the same total energy in each means the energy per hertz must halve as frequency doubles: −3.01 dB per octave, to be exact. That also matches the way pitch works — every octave feels like the same musical distance — so pink noise is the color most people describe as "even" or "natural." Steady rainfall and rustling leaves are close natural approximations, which is why pink is the default suggestion for people who find white too bright and brown too muffled.

The pink noise here is not a transformed recording. White noise (random samples, generated in your browser) runs through Paul Kellet's pink filter — a cascade of one-pole sections, a widely used approximation of the ideal 1/f slope. We measured our implementation offline at 44.1 kHz: across the octave bands from 125 Hz to 8 kHz the slope came out at about −3 dB per octave, in line with the definition. For the deeper variant, see the brown noise player; for the raw material, the white noise player.

When people choose pink

Pink is the middle path: enough high-frequency presence to mask voices and household clatter, little enough to sit under a conversation or a book. Many people use it for sleep and for open-plan focus for the same reason. Claims that pink noise boosts deep sleep or memory go beyond what the evidence supports — treat it as a masking sound you happen to like, which is reason enough. The sleep guide covers the practical side.

Questions

Is pink noise better than white noise for sleep?: Better is a matter of ears, not physics. Pink masks the same kinds of sounds with less perceived brightness, so more people tolerate it all night. Try both at the same low volume on different nights and keep the one you stop noticing.
What does 1/f noise mean?: It is the engineer's name for pink noise: power density falls in proportion to 1/f, which works out to half the power (−3 dB) every time frequency doubles.
Why does this pink noise not sound like the sea?: Ocean recordings rise and fall in waves; pink noise is steady. The spectrum is similar, but the steadiness is the point — a sound that swells and fades draws attention instead of masking it.
Can I download this as a file?: Yes — the export button renders a 60-second WAV of the current mix in your browser, from the same generator the player uses.