Highway
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0Highway
Highway Noise is a steady broadband background of passing cars, measured at a mid-distance of 50 to 150 m from the road. Spectrally it's very close to pink noise, with a peak around 200 to 800 Hz formed by tyre-on-asphalt, and a broader lower-frequency component from engines. Individual cars are distinguishable (the hum approaches, peaks and recedes through the Doppler effect), but they form a continuous ribbon rather than discrete events.
This is a paradoxically useful scene. Spectrally, highway noise is very close to pink noise, which, per Zhou and colleagues (Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2012), helps increase delta-wave density in slow-wave sleep. That is why people who grew up by a highway in big cities often don't sleep well in complete rural silence; the brain is used to uniform hum as an all-is-well signal. Sustained exposure to highway noise above 65 dB, however, is a cardiovascular disease risk factor (Münzel et al., European Heart Journal, 2014); our recording is always at a comfortable 50 to 55 dB for background use.
Use this track to mask neighbour noise (low-frequency masking works better than pure white noise), for writing urban prose (Hemingway, Bukowski), for podcasts about cities and transit, for people who grew up by a highway and feel nostalgia, or as a falling-asleep background in a bedroom with an open window on a quiet street. Pairs with City Noise, Rain on Windowsill and Whistling Wind (if you want to add autumn outside).
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ReduxSound v1.0.0
Ambient sound mixer for relaxation and focus