lowhum ~ Deep Brown Noise For Focus


Deep brown noise for focus, for the macOS menu bar.Β 

Single-purpose menu bar app that generates deep brown noise locally and plays it on loop. Install it, click play, forget about it. Cumulative-sum brown noise through a Butterworth bandpass (1 to 500 Hz, 20 Hz sub-bass highpass), RMS-normalized per chunk, crossfaded at boundaries. Everything is stored inΒ ~/.lowhum/. Playback streams through PortAudio via memory-mapped files, so the full WAV never sits in RAM. The app polls audio devices every 2 seconds and stops instantly if headphones disconnect or a Bluetooth device drops.

Menu bar controls

The menu bar icon is a template image, so macOS handles dark/light mode automatically. Further, use it for:

  • Play / Stop from the menu bar
  • Pick any connected audio device from the Output Device submenu
  • Noise color selection (brown, pink, white)
  • Auto-stops when headphones connect or disconnect

Requires macOS and Python 3.12+.

lmarkmann.github.io/lowhum
github.com/lmarkmann/lowhum

References:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_noise