Highway
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0Highway
"Highway Noise" is a steady broadband background of passing cars, measured at a mid-distance of 50–150 m from the road. Spectrally it is very close to pink noise, with a peak around 200–800 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 a "all is well" signal. However, prolonged exposure to highway noise above 65 dB is a cardiovascular disease risk factor (Münzel et al., European Heart Journal, 2014); our recording is always at comfortable 50–55 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, and as a falling-asleep background in a bedroom with an open window on a quiet street. Pairs with City Noise, Rain on Windowsill, Whistling Wind (if you want to add "autumn outside").
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ReduxSound v1.0.0
Ambient sound mixer for relaxation and focus