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If you’re feeling an urge to regress–past latency, even!–perhaps you should consider a system called BabyPlus, where you can hear what babies hear during varying stages of development. And once the womb-world crossover is complete, this “Authentic Prenatal Sound Teddy Bear” will give babies more of what they were used to hearing in utero. So as not to foster an addiction to bygone, prenatal days, the bear also produces “five other five other soothing sounds, including white noise, lullaby, ocean, car ride, and heartbeat.” If the child isn’t having teddy bears, there’s Baby’s Vacuum Cleaner CD–”73 minutes of Soothing Vacuum Cleaner Sound”! Equipping ordinary gadgets with the capacity to produce soothing sounds is nothing new–alarm clocks that will wake you up with rainfall or “night forest,” “Audio Sleep Mattresses,” et al. As a child, the most soporific sounds to me could be detected from within the din of the euchre game going on in my parent’s kitchen. Then it was the noise from the garbage trucks on Third Avenue. Now I guess I’ll go with cicadas, if they’re in stock. If not, I’ll take crickets. Do you remember enjoying a particular calming noise as a child, and has that preference changed?
Comments (13)
Comment
I remember the drone of the old DC-6 and Constellation airliners high in the sky, and the old Evinrude v-4 outboards on the river nearby, as the cicadas noisily announced the ides of summer.
posted by Tom on 7-2-2007 at 1:38 pm
This will sound bizarre… When I was a child it was pumpjacks and the occasional freight train passing by in the distance that I fell asleep to. They weren’t loud… just a continual and monotonous background noise. I became so accustomed to the sound that I had trouble sleeping when I was away from home.
The ironic thing is years later I now live not to far from pumpjacks and train tracks… and now the noise keeps me awake. We keep the windows shut and use one of those soothing sound generators… my favorite is ocean surf.
posted by Jason! on 7-2-2007 at 1:42 pm
I also like freight trains when I was little, they would go really slowly past the apartment late at night.
When I was a newborn, apparently early 80s rap put me to sleep. There was a teenage girl that lived below us and she would blast music when she got home from school (naptime for me). You could feel the bass through the floor and it would rock the crib a little. My mom actually told her mother that she shouldn’t stop playing it so loud since it put me to sleep so while (her mother had apologized when she found out there was a newborn upstairs.
posted by audrey on 7-2-2007 at 2:16 pm
I suppose it has something to do with spending my childhood in the Florida heat, but the sound of an oscillating fan puts me out immediately.
posted by natlynn on 7-2-2007 at 5:10 pm
I sleep better with a little background noise; music or street noise or some innocuous TV show. Mom told me that when I was a baby my older siblings (I’m no.8 of 9 kids) would play in the same room I would nap in, and the only time she’d have trouble getting me to sleep was when it was quiet.
I could’ve used that Vacuum Cleaner CD when my daughter was new-born; she was very fussy, crying for hours on end most nights, finally giving in to exhaustion around midnight. The vacuum (or any loud appliance) was the only thing that would quiet her. She grew out of it at about 3 months, but that was a very long 3 months.
posted by Dave on 7-2-2007 at 9:33 pm
Babbling brook is my favorite, but blaring anything puts me to sleep too- over stimulation?
posted by Miss Kiki on 7-2-2007 at 9:39 pm
Apparently, as an infant I’d only shut up for loud metal, especially Judas Priest. I still like music to fall asleep to, and have resorted to wearing headphones to bed when away from home.
posted by Jen on 7-2-2007 at 10:51 pm
When I was little, I lived in Hawaii. And the two things that calmed me down most back then(and even today) are frogs croaking and the soft patter of rain falling on the roof.
Nowadays, it’s hard for me to go to sleep without the sound of my air purifier droning quietly on the floor.
posted by heather on 7-2-2007 at 11:25 pm
When I was so young that I took naps we didn’t have air-conditioning. In the summer the windows would be open and I would listen to the constant little breezes that came in, and the breezes would cause the plastic tips on the ends of the curtain cords to make an almost rhythmic clicking sound against the wall. An occasional car would pass by, and if they were heading north I would hear the tone of the engine change as the car started up a small hill.
posted by Tdave on 7-3-2007 at 1:39 am
I was born-raised in Hawaii in a plantation town, so I’m partial to the sound of a sugar cane mill–bulldozers, grinding, burly men shouting in Pidgin. The closest I get now is Thursday garbage pickup; I sleep good on Thursday mornings.
posted by Rachel on 7-3-2007 at 6:37 am
I scared my parents the first time I slept through the night. I was only a few weeks old. Back then, I could sleep through anything… parties, fireworks, etc.
A few months ago we were having a pretty bad drought. I was going crazy and couldn’t sleep. We bought a rain storm cd for the bedroom and it put me right out.
Now that it’s raining almost daily, I have a hard time staying awake at work some days.
posted by Tru on 7-3-2007 at 7:33 am
When I was little the dryer was next my room on the other side of the wall. To this day, I sleep better with the dryer running.
I also grew up next to a busy highway full of big rigs. No one makes a big-rigs cd to go to sleep to. I sure would like one,though.
posted by Melissa on 7-3-2007 at 2:32 pm
When I was little my mom would play her Jazzercise tapes to get me to sleep. Nursery rhymes just made me cranky and sometimes she would sing Aretha Franklin to me!
posted by Rachel on 7-3-2007 at 10:51 pm