These 12-Hour-Long Ambient Noises Combine Experimental Art with Nerd Culture

You might need headphones to really "enjoy" these pieces (and not freak out your neighbors).

Posted by Xander Pakzad

Audio design in movies, TV, and games is one of those features we don’t often focus on, but we’d be lost without it. Sound effects and music can drastically affect the tone, how we interpret a story, and how we remember it years later. You can probably hum the melody to your childhood 8-bit classics, or know exactly how the cheesy lasers, roars, and explosions were made in your favorite adventure movie just by hearing them.

So when these sounds are taken out of context, they’re pretty powerful at taking the context with them. They transport you back to those imaginary worlds, and can even make new ones. “Cheesy Nirvosa” is an electronic musician who takes popular sound effects, music, and ambient noise from TV shows and movies, and he stretches them out into hours-long pieces. For you music nerds out there, he draws upon a lot of modern experimental stuff like John Cage’s 4’33” and Steve Reich’s looping and phasing techniques.

Some of Nirvosa's work reminds me of binaural meditation music, others would make good background music for studying. And then some are purely for trolling purposes. Here are my favorites, but he has a ton more on his YouTube channel.

Star Trek: The Next Generation - Sickbay


Star Wars - Millenium Falcon


Blade Runner - In The Tyrell Building


Super Mario Bros. - Block-Breaking Sound


Scare the crap out of your family with the gurgling sound from The Grudge.


And just to be totally weird, here’s 10,000 digits of pi dialed on a rotary phone.

The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author's alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Ora Media, LLC, its affiliates, or its employees.

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