Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/12/i-hear-phantom-music-when-i-use-a-white-noise-machine-and-im-not-alone-understanding-auditory-pareidolia.html
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For me it’s usually classical. Which is odd, as I don’t usually listen to classical.
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Human brains evolved to recognize patterns. If you see a tiger in the shadows that isn’t real, no harm done. If you fail to recognize one that is, you win the Darwin award. Very strong evolutionary pressure to recognize patterns to the point that we see them in everything. First I’ve heard of the auditory version of this phenomenon, but it makes perfect sense. Pattern recognition is our superpower as a species, and I’m of the opinion that a lot of our “great leaps forward” started by recognizing some obscure little pattern that lead to bigger things. Anyway, Cool, neat article!
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i have this. but rarely. i know it as “Musical Ear Syndrome”.
its definetly weird. but its just the brain doing brain things.
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Thank you for this. The same thing happens to me except it’s phantom gibberish NPR. It’s been happening long enough I wasn’t sure if it was something in my brain or the acoustics of the corner of my room. It goes away if I try to listen to it or the noise maker or just lift my head up off the pillow. Now I know it’s just my stupid brain.
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I definitely have this, 99% with music. I wasn’t aware it had a name, but definitely figured it was my OCD brain just trying to build songs from snippets of semi-similar notes in “nature.” Then they replay on repeat in my head. 
This leads me to turn on some music to escape the replay cycle. Thus implanting yet more music to later vaguely recognize in random fuzz noise. Needless to say, I avoid white noise and office environments with underlying humming machinery.
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For me it’s almost always jazz, specifically big band and it sounds just a tiny bit too far away to recognize the song.
I’m glad to know it has a name and is not alarming, I kind of guessed it was weird tinnitus.
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I get voices, either people talking in the hallway, or a radio talk show. Music, less often. I get aggravated, as in, who won’t shut up at 4am? And I turn off the white noise and it’s gone. Grrr.
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I have this with percussive rhythms. The ticking of a clock, or the repetitive sounds of train or subway wheels can make interesting tunes that aren’t actually there. But if I’m conscious of it I can affect it.
My ten-year-old noticed this as well just the other day. “Daddy, how come I can make the ticking clock make any tune I want?”
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This, radio announcer voices that I can’t quite make out wtf they’re saying. Drives me crazy. It’s the reason I can’t stand those white noise machines. The dishwasher does it bad enough
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I first noticed this while trying to sleep on a boat, near a noisy engine. I was able to choose what I wanted to hear in the noise, and managed to play an entire Weird Al album that I had more-or-less memorized at the time. It really sounded like a tinny-sounding speaker was hidden in a corner of the room.
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This is some good news to have in my pocket for future reference.
I once had a housemate wake me at 2 AM to listen to the bathroom tap to make sure that it actually sounded like music and they wern’t crazy.
It was very awkward at the time.
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When I visit my sister, I stay in a room with a large fish tank with a water pump running all night. As I am falling asleep, I hear what sounds like people having conversations off in the distance. (like at a party.) So, yea, glad it’s not just me.
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This is reassuring! There have been times when I’ve ridden in a car as a passenger and thought I was hearing music in the noise of the rhythm of the tires on the highway pavement. I thought it was just my imagination playing tricks on me, or being tired, like a waking dream. Knowing that it’s “normal” makes me feel a lot better. 
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I have never, ever suffered under the delusion of being “normal.” I have learned to just accept my weirdness and not worry too much about it.
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Even so, I thought it was odd the first time I noticed the “road music”, and it did worry me a little. It’s nice to know it’s not that unusual. 
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After a 18 hour dance marathon, I was helping clean up by vacuuming, and no doubt as a result of having listened to what our youth group leaders thought was popular with teens in the 80s for an excessive amount of time, kept hearing music in the white noise of the machine. I turned it off to remind whoever was playing around with the sound system instead of cleaning up so we could all go home, and discovering that it wasn’t the sound system. Twice, actually, before figuring it out, but I had been up for a while. It had a beat, a base line, melody, like something from early Depeche Mode.
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Oh interesting. This probably why I used to hear Spirit in the sky whenever my old phone was set to vibrate. Or why a bird I heard in Cambodia last year almost made me think of Don’t fear the reaper (it sounded almost exactly like the cowbell in that song, right down to the tempo).
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Dude, that totally happens to me. Especially if I am in what I call “sleep limbo” where I am not quite awake, not quite asleep with a white noise machine.
It was the worst when I had crippling depression and sleeping in really late (partly because I didn’t realize my drugs were not letting me fall asleep asleep.)
I would swear that I heard a radio outside with like Aerosmith’s Crazy on. Like people on a roof or something and I could hear a radio. But I realized, oh wait, it is just playing the same parts over and over, not the whole song.
It can still happen, and it seems to be more likely to happen if one ear is covered so that only one ear is really listening. When I turn my head so the 2nd (left) ear can hear better, it goes away.
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