For rooms with a hum in them
Air handling, a fridge compressor, a lift motor, traffic through single glazing. These are the disturbances that are hard to name and hard to ignore, and they all sit under 250 Hz where brown noise carries 66% of its power.
Forty-five per cent is enough to flatten that band without the mix becoming a presence in its own right. This preset is quieter than the sleep version at 50% for the same reason every work preset here is: awake, you notice more.
The mistake: choosing brown noise because it is trending
Brown noise has spent two years as the internet's default focus sound, and a lot of people are using it in offices where the actual problem is people talking. Against speech it does very little — almost none of its energy is above 4 kHz, which is exactly where speech becomes intelligible.
The test takes ten seconds. Play this, and if you can still follow a conversation across the room, you want white noise, not brown.
Why the wind layer is the same 15% as its white-noise twin
Both focus presets carry mellow wind at 15%, and that is deliberate rather than lazy. It is the one variable held constant across the pair so you can compare the colours without a second difference in the way.
It also does slightly less work here. Brown noise is already less flat to the ear than white noise, so the movement matters more on the bright preset than on this one. Drop it to zero if you prefer a pure floor.
Both layers, measured
Measured on 2026-09-04: the wind loop decoded to 48 kHz mono from the shipped file, brown noise rendered from the browser generator, both through the EBU R128 meter and an averaged 8192-point FFT.
| Layer | Preset level | Loop | Loudness | RMS | Centre | Low / mid / high |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brown Noise | 45% | generated, no loop | -15.5 LUFS | -13.9 dBFS | 537 Hz | 65.9% / 31.7% / 2.3% |
| Mellow Wind | 15% | 32.02 s | -16.2 LUFS | -16.8 dBFS | 233 Hz | 71.4% / 28.6% / 0% |
- Mellow Wind loop join: the step between the loop’s last sample and its first measures 0.29× that file’s own 99.9th-percentile sample-to-sample move — inside the material, so a butt-join would not tick. The player overlaps each pass by 179 ms regardless.
- What this preset cannot do: On a laptop speaker, most of the brown-noise layer never arrives. If this preset sounds like quiet wind and nothing else, the speaker is the reason and the fader will not fix it.
Play brown noise for focus
- Open this page in any browser.
- The preset is already applied: brown noise at 45%, mellow wind at 15%, timer at 50 minutes.
- Press play and listen for whether the room hum has flattened.
- If people talking still cuts through, switch to the white noise focus preset instead.
Frequently asked questions
Is brown noise good for focus?
For low-frequency room noise — air handling, fridges, traffic — it is the most effective colour here. Against speech it does almost nothing, because it has hardly any energy above 4 kHz.
How loud should brown noise be for work?
Quieter than for sleep. This preset starts at 45% against 50% for the sleep version, because you notice more while awake.
Brown noise or white noise for concentration?
Match the disturbance. Brown noise puts 66% of its power below 250 Hz; white noise puts 83% above 4 kHz. One covers rumble, the other covers voices, and neither covers both.
Does brown noise improve productivity?
There is no good evidence that it does. What it can do is make a distracting room less distracting, which is a smaller and more defensible claim.
Should I keep the wind layer?
It matters less here than on the white noise version, because brown noise is already less flat to the ear. Try a block each way.