Also, I’ve decided Phantom Gibberish NPR will be the name of my next band.
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I don’t spend any time listening to white noise generators, but I notice when I listen to (relatively soft) music while in the shower, the white noise of the water changes the music, often to something unrecognizable, or a familiar song gets initially interpreted as a completely different song (which collapses when distinctive bits intrude, causing a sudden disorienting shift in my understanding of what I’m listening to). I always assumed it was just that certain frequencies were being amplified or muffled by the environment and white noise, but it seems like this sort of auditory pareidolia plays a role.
And then they make things like this, just to confuse things:
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Here’s the video:
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I haven’t used a white noise generator, so I’ve never experienced this. I have, however, occasionally heard a voice very loudly call out my name, either right as I’m drifting off to sleep, or right as I’m waking up. It creeps me the fuck out every time.
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I’ll add that my pareidolia started when I had an upstairs neighbor who would come home at 2 a.m. drop his shoes on his bedroom floor and then watch TV just loud enough for me to hear it muffled through the ceiling. I started playing “brown noise” from my phone through a speaker dock to drown it out. The pareidolia started after he moved out. I guess my brain thinks, ‘oh wait there’s supposed to be muffled talking sounds when I hear the loud SHHHHHHHH.’
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Very interesting! I’ve never had the phantom music experience in any other situations, but it happened once when I had an MRI. I seemed to hear indistinct voices speaking when the machine was in pause mode. It was definitely weird.
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ant races, FTW!
i know my pareidolia is strong. i am a pattern seeker in some of the weirdest ways.
back in AZ, i would sleep with an old-timey metal blade fan that was slightly out of true. as i would be drifting off, i would hear what seemed to be a Mexican radio station with mariachi music, commentary and commercials. straining to make out words and phrases would keep me lying there, half in, half out of sleep and going mad over time. installed a quiet ceiling fan and problematic pareidolia went away. until the ac unit went weird on me…
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I wish that I’d been able to do that. After a career in IT, in addition to music I also hear a variety of phantom alerts or tones associated with PCs or software. My phone is set on vibrate and my laptop stays in Sleep mode overnight, so in my mind I’m sure nothing’s coming from either one. When it gets too distracting, the only way to make it stop is to turn the noise machine off and back on (I live near a highway, so it’s difficult to sleep without it).
This bugs me, too, because the faucet is shaped like a pump. When the water hits the basin at an angle it really sounds like an faint alarm. We’ve had enough fire drills in my building to make me adjust the flow of the water to stop it. 
This is one of my favorite points made by Dr. Arroway in Contact. Too often, people ignore the importance of listening. Rejecting dismissive attitudes, acceptance, and the drive to search for reasons or meaning in what we experience can make a huge difference in what we learn and discover. Like that character, I’m glad we’re not alone!
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I’ve heard music and voices when I’ve been sleep deprived. I’d hear funny voices singing quietly over ambient sounds. I could sing a song to myself and the voices would sing along, or i could think of a joke and they would laugh like chipmunks.
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I’ve had low level noise resolve as voices, many types of music (usually entire songs), and the phone ringing. There was even a dog in the neighborhood for a while who lived just far enough away to sound exactly like a goose honking whenever s/he barked, which was often. It took work to force the sound to be a dog’s barking.
I have also heard my name called while falling asleep many times, and almost always by an unrecognized voice. So weird.
The oddest auditory pareidolia I’ve experienced also came while trying to sleep. My BF puts on mellow, ambient-ish falling-asleep music every night, but this time the volume was esp low. It was so quiet my brain decided to resolve it as serious bizarrerie: complete heavy metal songs, featuring the stylings of one of those screamy, creepy, bass-demon-soundalike “vocalists.” I quickly ahem tired of this. It was annoyingly demonic enough to make me chuckle and go turn it up a notch or three, so I would hear what was actually playing. My BF woke up when I climbed back into bed, still quietly chuckling, and asked what was happening. I briefly described the curious auditory hallucination, and he pretty much laughed himself back to sleep. Cracks us up whenever we recall it.
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I lived at a Zen Monastery for a while, right on a rushing mountain river. It’s in the river’s valley, and anywhere you go for a few miles around, you can hear the constant, steady roar of the river.
It was common knowledge there that you could have auditory hallucinations, sometimes quite elaborate, especially while meditating. The abbot of the monastery described once hearing an entire cocktail party underway with music, laughing, dishes, et cetera. She listened attentively for a couple of minutes before suddenly realizing that obviously couldn’t be actually happening in the middle of the wilderness.
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I had this start happening this year, after a nasty ear infection (I sneezed so hard I blew out an ear drum), when I’d hear what sounded like people talking on the radio whilst trying to sleep. Once I’d worked out it wasn’t a radio, I guessed that it was just my brain making stuff up.
After getting up the first time to make sure I’d not left a tv/radio/etc on, I’ve come to recognise it, and I can just ignore it now. I can sleep through a band playing in the next room, so a quiet ‘radio’ isn’t much of a distraction.
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I’ve often wondered if my use of white noise is related to the kinds of hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations you identified here. I use the white noise machine to drown out my tinnitus and I think it cuts down the frequency of those hallucinations compared to when I try sleeping without the noise. But I may also just be…imagining another pattern that may not exist.
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I never needed a white noise generator to voices as I fall asleep. Typically it would sound like a room full of people muttering nonsense over each other, but when I started learning an instrument in high school the “voices” would occasionally play nonsensical music in their little room instead.
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