What is pink noise?
Pink noise falls away at about 3 decibels per octave as pitch rises, which puts it exactly halfway between the flat spectrum of white noise and the steep bass-heavy slope of brown. That slope is also written as 1/f, and it is not an arbitrary choice: it is the distribution that rainfall, wind and running water tend to follow.
That is the reason pink noise is so often described as the natural sounding one. Your ear has spent a lifetime hearing this slope from weather and water, so it reads as ordinary background rather than as a device in the room.
Pink noise output by frequency
Sounds likeGentle rain, wind through leaves, a distant waterfall.
Try it forA softer noise bed when white feels too sharp.
Skip it ifThe room is genuinely loud. White blocks more completely.
Why listeners choose pink noise
Pink noise has less high-frequency energy than white noise, so many listeners find its balance softer. It may still mask a changing room, but no noise color is the best choice for everyone.
The research needs careful reading. A 2012 study tested steady pink noise in 40 overnight participants and 10 nap participants. A well-known 2013 study instead used 50 millisecond pulses timed to slow brain waves. Those timed laboratory pulses are not the same exposure as this continuous player and do not prove that leaving pink noise on improves deep sleep or memory. Our evidence guide explains the distinction.
How loud should you set it?
Pink noise is the most forgiving color to set, which is its own small trap: it stays pleasant well past the volume it needs to be. Find the quietest level that still covers the disturbance rather than the loudest level that still feels nice, and you will get the same masking with less on your ears by morning.
Because pink stays pleasant well past the point it needs to be, the useful check is not how it sounds but whether turning it down one notch changes anything you can actually detect. If it does not, leave it down. The full three-step method is here.
How this generator actually works
Real pink noise is more work than most sites are willing to do, so what you usually get is a recording on repeat. Nothing here is recorded: the audio is generated in your browser by a port of the generator that runs inside the Veil app.
The slope comes from the Paul Kellet cascade: six leaky integrators running at staggered corner frequencies, summed together, which approximates a true 1/f response far more cheaply than filtering white noise directly. A small amount of unshaped white is mixed back in to keep the top end from sounding dead, then two low-pass stages at 6 kHz and 8 kHz take off the hiss.
Two independent cascades run in buffers of about 30 and 37 seconds, with coprime sample counts, and are mixed together. Because those lengths share no common factor, the combined pattern does not come back around until roughly 1.55 years at 44.1 kHz have passed, and each loop boundary is crossfaded against real continuation samples rather than faded to silence, so there is no seam to catch.
Try the other colors.
Which color works is personal, and a minute of listening settles it faster than any chart. Each of these is a live generator like this one: White noise Brown noise Green noise Grey noise Blue noise. Or hear all six side by side. If noise is not the right texture, there are also seven fan sounds.
Common questions.
What is pink noise?
Is pink noise better than white noise for sleep?
Does pink noise really improve deep sleep?
What does pink noise sound like?
Can I run this all night?
Is this pink noise generator free?
Created by Colin Hanson, maker of Veil. The player uses the same procedural audio approach as the Veil app.