I’m trying to figure out what’s happening to me and I’m not sure where to look.

For the last several years, whenever I listen to silence-filling noise (white, brown, pink, etc.) I tend to hear additional sounds. It’s like having your radio tuned to a MHz that’s just off a tiny bit, so you hear static but there’s just a slight edge of voices or something that you can’t quite make out but is definitely there. Sometimes, instead of voices, it’s also patterns in the noise or various pitches.

It happens in a variety of situations, like Youtube videos, audio tracks from meditation apps and noise generators, and even devices that have no audio input or antenna and are specifically for noise as you’d find in the waiting room of a massage clinic. It even happens when it’s a completely benign source like an air fan. And the sounds I hear match the volume of the source.

Do I have superpowers? A brain tumor? Am I just sensitive to imperfect wave form generation? Am I part-dog? Have I done damage to myself from listening to Metallica way too loud for too many years?

Where do I start looking into this? Does anyone have any possible explanations for what I’m experiencing that might lead me in the right direction?

  • @[email protected]
    27•9 months ago

    Hey there. I experience the same thing. The voices, the music, in the white noises around me.

    I’m not schizophrenic (or at least I hope not). It is a weird phenomenon that some of us experience that seems to be our brains trying to match important patterns, like speech, out of noise.

    Heck, Devin Townsend even wrote a song about it “Voices in the Fan.”

    If it’s really bothering you or scaring you then, yeah, you could seek help, but if you’re not experiencing auditory hallucinations outside of this context then my completely unqualified opinion is you’re probably fine.