“White noise” MIDI file

Noises at night can disturb sleep. If you can’t stop these noises, then you could try “masking” them by generating white noise.

However, if you attend a conference and find your accommodation is noisy, you might not have brought any device that can generate a continuous stream of white noise.

This MIDI file can be played on some older mobile phones as a “ringtone” (if the phone supports MIDI ringtones, e.g. Windows Mobile 6, *not* Android or iOS). Its size is less than 2 kB but it still gives 1 hour of continuous noise (which usually works better than setting a shorter file to repeat).

“White noise” MIDI file

May sound bad on some devices. It *should* sound like this (but much longer).

noise.mp3

It is not *true* white noise because most phone-based synthesizers can’t do that. Instead, I tell your phone’s tone generator to play an impossibly low violin chord containing all 12 pitches of the chromatic scale. On *some* synthesizers, this results in a mingling of harmonics that approximates white noise. But on other synthesizers you just get a cacophonous rumble. Your mileage may vary.

If the “white noise” MIDI file does not work on your equipment, you could try this white noise AMR file instead (2.3 M download for 1 hour of noise). It’s still smaller than MP3s etc, although not nearly as small as the MIDI file.

white noise AMR file

Silent MIDI file

You might also be interested in this 52-byte silence.mid to set as a ring-tone for persistent sales departments etc. It actually has two extremely soft notes with silence in between, as some players are ‘confused’ by anything less, but you’re unlikely to hear it. If you need an MP3, try this silence.mp3 (1 second, 1.9k).

silence.mid

silence.mp3

MIDI ringtone generator

Here is a Python script to generate MIDI ringtones (for older, MIDI-capable phones, *not* modern Android or iOS); the ringtones generated are:

Non-musical, to avoid spoiling any music anyone in your company might be thinking of at the time

Not all the same (so you can recognise your phone among other similar phones, and/or set different versions to different contacts)

First increasing in volume, but then decreasing, in case your phone does not have a function to mute an incoming call without rejecting it

The script can of course be customised.

Note that Apple phones are not capable of playing these MIDI files as ringtones: even after converting to m4r (which typically uses 50 or 100 times the storage space), the phone’s length limit will be too short for the extended reduced-volume section, and the process of loading the file onto the phone requires additional proprietary software and setup. Many Android phones are not much better in this instance: they dropped support for MIDI ringtones and don’t always support long ringtones.

Download: ringtone.py (requires Python to run)

ringtone.py

Legal

All material © Silas S. Brown unless otherwise stated. Android is a trademark of Google LLC. Apple is a trademark of Apple Inc. MP3 is a trademark that was registered in Europe to Hypermedia GmbH Webcasting but I was unable to confirm its current holder. Python is a trademark of the Python Software Foundation. Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corp. Any other trademarks I mentioned without realising are trademarks of their respective holders.