White, Pink and Brown Noise: What's the Difference?

By Matt Gordon · Updated November 2, 2026

All three are random noise. The only difference is how the energy is split between high and low pitches. White noise hisses like a TV with no signal. Pink noise sounds like steady rain. Brown noise is a deep rumble, closer to an airplane cabin or surf heard from a distance.

Listen and compare

The quickest way to hear the difference is to switch between them. Headphones help.

Turn off after

The noise is generated in your browser. No ads, no sign-up, and it starts quietly. Keep this tab open while it plays. For a whole night, use the Spotify tracks further down, which also plant trees.

The three side by side

	White	Pink	Brown
Sounds like	Hiss, TV static, a radio between stations	Steady rain, a waterfall up close	Low rumble, airplane cabin, a storm outside the window
Energy	Equal per hertz. About half of it sits in the highest octave.	Equal per octave	Drops steeply toward the highs, almost no treble
Best at covering	Voices, clattering, high-pitched sounds	A bit of everything	Traffic, a neighbor's bass, humming appliances, snoring
Also called	Static, broadband noise	1/f noise, flicker noise	Red noise, Brownian noise, 1/f² noise

Energy per octave. Each step doubles the frequency. White noise gains 3 dB with every octave, which is why it sounds bright. Brown noise loses 3 dB per octave and sounds dark.

White noise

White noise has every audible frequency at the same strength, the way white light contains every color. That's where the name comes from.

To your ear it is anything but balanced. There are as many hertz between 10,000 and 20,000 as there are between 20 and 10,000, so about half of white noise's energy lands in the top octave: the highest sounds you can hear. That's the hiss, and it's why a lot of people find white noise tiring after a while.

It's also what makes it good at hiding speech. Consonants live in the upper frequencies. When they're buried, a conversation in the next room stops being understandable. That's why offices and therapists' waiting rooms use white noise for privacy.

Pink noise

In pink noise, every octave carries the same amount of energy. An octave is a doubling of frequency: 100 to 200 Hz, or 5,000 to 10,000 Hz. We hear pitch in ratios too, so pink noise sounds even, without the highs poking out. Measured per hertz, its level falls by 3 dB per octave.

Sound engineers use it to tune speakers and rooms because it's the closest thing to "neutral" for human hearing. The name follows the light analogy: light weighted toward the low end of the spectrum, the red end, looks pink.

If you don't know where to start, start with pink.

Brown noise

Brown noise isn't named after the color. It's named after Robert Brown, the Scottish botanist who described in 1827 how tiny particles in water jitter around at random. That Brownian motion is also the recipe for the sound: each value is the previous one plus a small random step. Measured per hertz, the result falls by 6 dB per octave, so almost nothing is left of the treble. Physicists call it red noise.

Brown noise took off on TikTok in 2022, usually with the claim that it helps with ADHD. There's almost no research on brown noise specifically. The studies below are nearly all about white and pink noise.

Because it's low, brown noise mostly covers low sounds: traffic, bass through the wall, a fridge humming. It's weaker against voices.

Brown noise vs white noise

They're opposites. White noise is bright and covers high sounds; brown noise is deep and covers low ones. Go by what keeps you awake:

Voices, a TV next door, a roommate on the phone: white noise. Brown noise barely touches the frequencies that make speech understandable.
Traffic, a snoring partner, a neighbor's subwoofer, an air conditioner: brown noise.
Nothing in particular, you just like a sound on: try both for a few nights. Most people who find white noise harsh prefer brown.

No study has compared the two head to head for sleep, so anyone who tells you one is proven better is guessing.

Pink noise vs white noise

Pink noise is white noise with the treble turned down. It still covers voices reasonably well, but without the hiss, which makes it easier to listen to for hours. If white noise works for you but tires you out, switch to pink before you switch to anything else.

Pink noise is also the one with the most sleep research behind it, though "most" is still not much, and one of the newest studies found a downside. More on that below.

Green, blue and violet noise

Green noise isn't a technical term. People usually mean noise centered on the middle of the hearing range, with little bass or treble, a bit like a distant waterfall. Blue and violet noise are the mirror images of pink and brown: they get louder toward the top and sound even sharper than white. Hardly anyone sleeps to them.

What the research shows, and what it doesn't

A lot of claims about noise get repeated online. The evidence is thinner than most pages let on.

Sleep in adults

In 2021, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania reviewed every study they could find on continuous noise as a sleep aid, 38 in all. Some found better sleep, some found worse. They rated the evidence that noise improves sleep as very low quality.¹

In February 2026 the same group published a sleep-lab experiment with 25 healthy adults. Pink noise softened some of the disruption from aircraft and traffic noise, but it also shortened REM sleep. Earplugs protected sleep better, without that side effect.²

What that means for you: if nothing disturbs you at night, noise probably won't make you sleep better. If noise wakes you up, try earplugs first. Plenty of people still like falling asleep to noise, because sudden sounds stand out less against it and the steadiness is calming. Nothing wrong with that. It's a habit, not a proven treatment.

Babies

The study almost every parenting site cites is small and dates from 1990: with white noise, 16 of 20 newborns fell asleep within five minutes, compared with 5 of 20 without.³ It didn't look at anything beyond those first minutes.

In 2014, a team in Toronto measured 14 infant sleep machines at full volume. At 30 cm (about a foot), every one was louder than 50 dB, the limit recommended for hospital nurseries. Three went past 85 dB, the level NIOSH sets as the limit for an adult's 8-hour workday.⁴

If you use noise for a baby:

Keep the phone or speaker out of the crib and away from the rails. Across the room is better.
Keep it quiet. A free sound meter app held where the baby's head goes should read under 50 dB.
Set a timer instead of running it all night. Babies spend a lot of their sleep in REM, which pink noise shortened in the 2026 study.

Focus, studying and ADHD

This is where the research gets more interesting. A 2024 meta-analysis pooled 13 studies with 335 participants, from schoolchildren to college students. People with ADHD or significant attention problems did slightly better on lab attention tasks with white or pink noise. People without ADHD did slightly worse. The authors couldn't find a single study on brown noise.⁵

The usual explanation comes from Swedish psychologist Göran Söderlund: a brain that's under-stimulated benefits from some background noise, and one that's already alert just gets distracted.⁶ So noise isn't a general focus booster. If you study noticeably better with it on, that fits the research. If you don't, a different color probably won't change that.

For studying, pink noise is the easiest to keep on for hours. Keep it quiet enough that you can still hear yourself think. Turning it up doesn't help.

Deep sleep and memory

In 2013, Jan Born's team at the University of Lübeck in Germany showed that short clicks of pink noise, timed to the brain's slow waves, deepened slow-wave sleep. The next morning people remembered more word pairs.⁷ That study often gets cited as proof that pink noise helps you sleep. It doesn't show that: the clicks lasted 50 milliseconds and were triggered by an EEG reading the sleeper's brain. A track playing all night is a different thing.

Tinnitus

Noise doesn't cure tinnitus. Some people find a soft background noise brings relief, because the ringing stands out less, especially when falling asleep. For high-pitched ringing, white or pink noise works better than brown, which has almost no highs. Set the noise a little quieter than the tinnitus, not louder. If your tinnitus is new or suddenly louder, see a doctor.

Which noise is right for you?

Voices bother you (open office, roommates, TV next door): white or pink.
Low sounds bother you (street, bass, snoring, HVAC): brown.
You just want a quiet head: pink. If that's too bright, brown.
You don't like "electronic" noise: rain. Its spectrum is roughly similar to pink noise, but it sounds natural.

Give each one a few nights. On the first night any new sound stands out. After three or four you'll know whether it's helping.

Playing it on Spotify without gaps

Our tracks are loops. To keep a gap from showing up between repeats:

In Spotify, open Settings → Playback (on a phone: tap your profile picture, then Settings and privacy → Playback).
Turn on Gapless playback.
If you have Premium, also turn on Crossfade and set it to a few seconds.
In the player, set the track to Repeat.

To have it switch off after you fall asleep, use the sleep timer in the playing track's three-dot menu.

Why these tracks plant trees

Every stream earns the artist a tiny amount, and Spotify counts a stream after 30 seconds. We plant one tree for every 100 or so plays.

So far we've planted 42,000 trees in Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique and Haiti, through the Eden Reforestation Project and ForestPlanet. Every donation is listed, with dates, on our homepage.

Please don't use bots or play the tracks on mute. It breaks Spotify's rules and could get the tracks taken down.

Want something shorter? Add our 31-second song "This Song Plants Trees" to your playlists.

Common questions

Is brown noise better than white noise for sleep?: Not proven either way, since no study has compared them directly. Brown noise is better at covering traffic and other low sounds, and many people find it less harsh. White noise is better at covering voices.
Which is better, white or pink noise?: For most people, pink, because it hisses less and is easier to listen to for hours. White is better if your main goal is drowning out voices.
Is it OK to sleep with white noise on all night?: For adults at a low volume, there's no evidence of harm, though there's also no proven benefit, and the 2026 study found pink noise shortened REM sleep. A 30 to 60 minute sleep timer is a reasonable middle ground. For babies, use a timer and keep it quiet (see above).
Is brown noise bad for you?: No more than any other sound at the same volume. Volume is what matters. Keep it comfortably quiet, especially with earbuds.
What noise color is best for ADHD?: The studies that exist used white and pink noise, and found a small benefit for people with ADHD only. There are no published trials of brown noise for ADHD. More on that.
Are ocean waves white noise?: No. Surf has far more bass and sits somewhere between pink and brown noise. It also has the rhythm of the waves, which true noise doesn't.
What's the difference between brown noise and red noise?: Nothing. They're two names for the same thing.

Sources

Riedy SM, Smith MG, Rocha S, Basner M. Noise as a sleep aid: A systematic review. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 2021.
Basner M et al. Efficacy of pink noise and earplugs … Sleep 49(5), 2026.
Spencer JA, Moran DJ, Lee A, Talbert D. White noise and sleep induction. Archives of Disease in Childhood 65(1), 1990.
Hugh SC et al. Infant sleep machines and hazardous sound pressure levels. Pediatrics 133(4), 2014.
Nigg JT, Bruton A et al. Systematic review and meta-analysis: Do white noise and pink noise help with attention in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder? Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 63(8), 2024.
Söderlund G, Sikström S, Smart A. Listen to the noise: noise is beneficial for cognitive performance in ADHD. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2007.
Ngo HV, Martinetz T, Born J, Mölle M. Auditory closed-loop stimulation of the sleep slow oscillation enhances memory. Neuron 78(3), 2013.

Matt Gordon started This Song Plants Trees in 2021 and released the noise tracks on this page. This page isn't medical advice.

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