Nature Cube
As much as I would like for my blogging to be a financially supporting endeavor, alas I do have to maintain a day job. This day job involves sitting in a cubicle all day and programming code, with the hum of florescent lights above, people typing, talking on the phone, etc. – your typical soul-sucking office environment sounds.
Somehow I don't think this is conducive to health or sanity and so I've tried listening to music with headphones on and off, but it's sometimes hard because it takes me away a little TOO much – I can't hear anything, and sometimes I actually do want to hear what my colleagues are talking about. Music - even calm, classical music - can sometimes be a bit distracting when you are working. Not always, but sometimes I really need as little noise as possible.
Last week, J-Walk Blog posted a link to a program called Atmosphere that produces atmospheric background sounds on your computer. I'm sure you've seen devices that are stand-alone or are built into alarm clocks at a Bed Bath and Beyond, or the Sharper Image, but this one is just for the computer. It produces a bunch of natural sounds like rain, surf, crackling fire, wildlife, etc., and believe it or not this actually works REALLY well in a moderately noisy office environment. You can listen to this stuff on your speakers rather than headphones because even in a relatively quiet office environment, the sounds, played at a reasonable volume, get more and more drowned out by other office background sounds the further you get from the speaker. Sitting about three feet from my speakers, I can hear them loud and clear, but if I walk just another 5 feet or so I have to really make an effort to listen to the sounds in order to hear any.
The program itself is much more customizable than anything I've seen in one of those sound affects machines that do something equivalent:
It has twelve predefined sound "Scenarios:" Woodland, Country, Dawn, Coast, Storm, Tropical, Summer, Jungle, Stream, Downpour, Night, and Fireside. The scenarious include a collection of different sounds and predefined levels and frequencies to mimic something in the natural world. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.
You can set up your own scenarios (or modify existing ones) and save each with their own name. You do this by including/excluding a combination of fifteen "Background Sounds" (Fire Crackling, Jungle, Ciccada, Surf, Rain on Roof, Hot Day, River Birds, Light Rain, Thunder, Water Flow, Night, SeaWind, Gentle Sea, Meadow, and Night Insects) in addition to a collection of 40 "random sounds." The so-called Background sounds are sounds that may have one or more individual components (just the sound of a gurgling brook or perhaps the sounds of a bunch of different birds and insects), in a fairly constant regular pattern.
Random Sounds (40 of them) are mainly animal in nature (birds and insects mostly but also frogs, various farm animals, trains, boats, and foghorns) and are specifically programmed to play at random intervals, since these are sounds that in nature are somewhat random and unpredictable. However, you can set each of these not only to play or not to play, but also how often to play. They are still random, but instead of a range being from onece every three to seven seconds, you might hear them once every minute or two depending on how you set them.
The customization doesn't end with just which sounds you want to include and at what frequency, but also the volume levels. You can of course control the volume level on your speaker, or your volume settings on your computer, but Atmoshpere lets you also control the overall volume of the Background Sounds IN COMPARISON to the overall volume of Random Sounds. To clarify a bit more, you can't control the volume of each INDIVIDUAL sound, but you can, say make the background rain louder and the birds and insects softer, or visa versa.
Once you tweak your environment to that perfect combination of sounds that aren't annoying but rather soothing and which take you out of your work environment a bit, you can save these settings for later recall. You can even record these to a sound file for later playing on your MP3 player while you're away from your computer.
In addition to the main functionality of creating sound environments from the predefined sounds available, you can also apparently record your own sounds and add them as custom background and random sounds to be used within the program. This sounds like an amazing tool for those who want to be able to create custom soundscapes without the use of a studio or expensive editing software that's really not designed to create stuff like this in the first place.
The final bit of functionality is in an alarm that you can set to go off. I suppose the idea behind this is that you could use the program to help you fall asleep and then be able to set an alarm to wake up. While a few might use this feature, my sense is that it either should have been more built out, or left out entirely. The alarm sounds like a telephone, but not a very loud and annoying one. It won't jar you awake and there's no way to customize it. The rest of the application is so well thought out, that this feature seems like it was an afterthought. Some ideas for future functionality might be to be able to program custom (or additional predefined) scenario that is louder and more "annoying" – say with more animal sounds or other atmospheric sounds that might be condusive to waking up – as your alarm, rather than just this one phone ring. A snooze button would also be good, as would multiple alarm settings, not just one. Also a "sleep" setting that would allow you to set the program to stop making sound after a half hour or hour would be nice, since after you fall asleep you don't really need to keep playing it.
One of the best things about this program is that it is free, or at least there's a free version called "Atmosphere Light." Everything I've talked about so far is in the free version which I have, but apparently the version that VectorMedia Software sells has for a very reasonable $15-115 depending on the type of license you want to buy, has a ton more stuff, so I'm seriously thinking of buying it. You can download a trial version of the so called "Amosphere Deluxe" that lasts for 21 days.
It looks like it has over 20 additional Scenarios (although I think for these you may need to purchase it outright), and a lot more random sounds – looks like over double what's on Atmosphere Light. And the interface is better organized allowing you to actually test out these sounds more methodically. The background sounds now have individual "panning" (I'm assuming this is a change in volume from one channel to another which simulates stereo dynamic movement), and volume settings. You can even randomize volume levels and set a maximum and minimum volume. Just an amazing amount of control, and something I'm sure some could spend hours playing with and tweaking if that's something that floats your boat! The amount of control in regard to not only setting these various things, but also the randomness makes for a tool that you could use to create a truly realistic background environment. It also comes with a screensaver that lets you pick various panoramas to pan through and the alarm function, while still the same, is supplemented by a "Timers" feature that lets you set specific scenarios to play at specific times of the day. So you could set a relaxing one to play from 11pm to 1pm, then nothing to play from 1am to 7am, then another relaxing one to play from 7am to 7:15am to help you get up, and if you haven't yet, a loud cacophony of birds and passing trains could be played from 7:15am to 7:30am!