We go, we go, we go ... 7.5 hours in Norway or a trip to silence

I'll start from far away. There have been moments when everything around you is annoying, when the sound of a neighborhood drill or music center after five hours of listening becomes the pulsating center of your personal universe.
While working in a coworking center or office you can not concentrate on the problem to be solved because of the conversations of your neighbors?
I present an optimal solution under the cut for reasons of price / effect.


There are several ways to protect yourself from annoying sounds from the outside.

• Soundproof passive - roughly speaking, is determined by the thickness of the walls or headphones that separate you from the outside world.
• Sound insulation active - a system that actively suppresses external sound vibrations. For ordinary mortals, it is represented by headphones like Sennheiser PXC450, Creative HN-700, Philips SHN9500, Bose Quiet Comfort 3, Jabra, C820s, AKG K28NC, Sony MDR-NC11A
• Masking is a way that does not eliminate the sound, but hides it.

In order to understand which method is most effective, it is necessary to present various situations in which extraneous sound interferes.
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House
Noise factor: neighbors, street, home.
The first way is the most logical and the most expensive is soundproofing an apartment. For those who are not aware of the occupation is very, very expensive. There is one simple rule that determines the effectiveness of sound insulation of a room - in order to isolate the volume as efficiently as possible you must build a room in the room, while in theory your interior should not touch the exterior and also the air gap between the rooms should be open volume and the interior should be airtight closed. No blankets, carpets or foam on the walls will save you, and in the case of foam it is likely to aggravate the problem. The implementation of the theoretically correct set of sound insulation measures is practically not feasible. If anyone is interested in this topic, take a look at acoustic.ru , there is even a “Album of typical solutions”
Also, this solution is useless if the source of noise is your home.

Office
There is no talk about passive sound insulation as such, you are not the owner of the premises, and especially you don’t want to invest in someone else’s real estate. It is also quite likely that you do not have your own room and you are sitting in general. Here, except for headphones, nothing will help you.
You can use headphones with active noise cancellation, I can’t say anything about this technology, since I didn’t have the pleasure to use it, but it’s worthwhile to assume that everything that can reduce the noise level is good for you.

And there remains the third way to separate yourself from noise - masking. Absolutely by chance, I determined the effectiveness of this method. Unfortunately, I was “lucky” with noisy neighbors, it didn’t hurt much, but sometimes it was pretty annoying. One day, at the beginning of the summer, I bought air conditioning, the whole summer the family enjoyed the coolness and I was quiet. The annoying noise disappeared and I thought that the neighbors had calmed down, but when the condition was off in the fall, I clearly heard laughter, conversations, steps and other delights of the concrete box in the residential area. The result was even a little overwhelming. The quiet rustle of the air conditioner resembling the noise of a distant waterfall "jammed" extraneous noises.
A little googling, I learned that this effect in architecture has been used for quite some time. The fountains in the rooms were located not for beauty, but for masking the room's own noise.

In a big city, the noise surrounds us constantly and the farther they get the more. Air noise is easily “muffled” with white noise, but besides it, unfortunately, there is a lot of shock, low-frequency noise in our life. It often annoys the most and is more difficult to isolate from it than from airborne noise.
I thought about how to get rid of shock noise. The first thing that comes to mind is music with music with a lot of bass. Unfortunately, this option is not suitable. Music has a strictly measured rhythm and can mask something only if it falls in time with the noise source, otherwise any extraneous beats appear. You can listen to cacophony or extremely heavy songs, but not everyone likes them and is difficult to sustain them.
Fingering various options it dawned on me - the train. The train is noise, and the noise is shock. The noise level in the train is quite high, a clear rhythm is absent, since besides the sound of the wheels knocking, the noise consists of many components. Well, the most important thing is perhaps the only loud noise that soothes instead of annoying.
In the long search on audio banks and railway station fans, I was looking for fairly high-quality and long segments of the train sounds, as it turned out to be a problem. But finally, now I don’t remember where, I found some good long samples, which I mixed and made into a loop.
The result was this.

This track is a little longer than 8 minutes, looped to the beginning and put on continuous playback - is perceived as endless.
In good headphones, loud conversations, phone calls in the neighborhood are muffled. The sound itself is not annoying and not annoying, after a while it simply stops noticing with the sound debris outside.

Since I made this track, I dreamed of only one thing - to find a good long video of the view from the train in order to close the immersion in the railway virtuality. And now, thanks to the efforts of the Norwegians - a miracle happened, which brings us back to the title of the topic and the video at the beginning. A video of more than seven hours appeared as 720p. We go by train and not somewhere there, but in Norway . Snow, mountains, tunnels, snow ... By the way, on the video above is Finse, the place where Star Wars V episodes were shot.
Confused by the unusual view from the driver’s cab and not from the window, but the spectacle is unmatched.
Video filmed by NRK as a pilot project. In essence, this is a documentary. This version is a sample. There is only a train and nothing more. The video was shot on a Sony XDCAM HD 1080p camera. The original file weighs 165GB. This version recoded to 720p weighs 22GB and is freely distributed under a Creative Commons license.
If you decide to download, make sure your system supports this file size. FAT32, for example, does not support.