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

I'll start from far away. There have been times when everything around you is annoying, when the sound of a neighbor's drill or music center after five hours of listening becomes the pulsating center of your personal universe.
Working in a coworking center or office, you can’t concentrate on the problem being solved due to conversations of your neighbors?
I present the optimal solution under the cut for price / effect reasons.


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

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

To understand which method is most effective, it is necessary to present various situations in which an extraneous sound interferes with us.

House
Noise factor: neighbors, street, home.
The first way is the most logical and most expensive is the soundproofing of the apartment. For those who are not in the know, this is a very, very expensive exercise. There is one simple rule that determines the effectiveness of soundproofing a room - in order to isolate the volume as efficiently as possible you should build a room in the room, while in theory your interior should not touch the outside and in addition the air gap between the rooms should be open volume and the inside should be airtight closed. No blankets, carpets or polystyrene on the walls will save you, and in the case of polystyrene, it is likely to exacerbate the problem. The implementation of the theoretically correct set of measures for sound insulation is practically not feasible. If someone is interested in this topic, take a look at acoustic.ru , there are even"Album of typical solutions"
Also, this solution is useless if the source of noise is your home.

Office
There is no talk of passive sound insulation as such, you are not the owner of the premises, and moreover you do not want to invest in someone else's real estate. It is also likely that you do not have your own premises and you sit in general. Here, except for headphones, nothing will help you.
You can use headphones with active noise reduction, I can’t say anything about this technology, because 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 a third way to separate oneself from noise - masking. Absolutely accidentally by experience I determined the effectiveness of this method. Unfortunately, I was “lucky” with noisy neighbors, it didn’t particularly interfere, but at times it was quite annoying. Once, in the beginning of summer, I bought air conditioning, all summer the family enjoyed the cool and I was quiet. The annoying noise disappeared and I thought that the neighbors had calmed down, but when the condition was turned off in the fall, at night, I distinctly heard laughter, conversations, steps and other delights of the concrete box in the sleeping area. The result was even a little amazing. The quiet rustle of an air conditioner reminiscent of the noise of a distant waterfall “drowned out” extraneous noises.
A little google, I found out that this effect has been used in architecture for quite some time. Fountains in the rooms were located not for beauty but for masking the room’s own noise.

In a big city, noise surrounds us constantly and the farther the more it gets. Airborne noise is easily "drowned out" by white noise, but besides it, unfortunately, in our life there is a lot of shock, low-frequency noise. It is most often annoying most and isolating from it is much more difficult than from airborne noise.
I was thinking about how to get rid of shock noise. The first thing that comes to mind is music, with music with lots of bass. Unfortunately, this option does not fit. Music has a strictly measured rhythm and can mask something only if it falls into the beat of a noise source, otherwise any extraneous beats appear. You can listen to cacophony or extremely heavy compositions, but not everyone likes them and it’s hard to withstand them.
Going through 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, there is no clear rhythm, since in addition to the sound of wheels, noise consists of many components. Well, and most importantly, this is perhaps the only loud noise that calms instead of annoying.
In a long search on the audio banks and railway fan sites, I was looking for fairly high-quality and long sections of train sounds, as it turned out to be a problem. But finally, now I don’t remember where, I found some good long samples that I mixed and mixed in a loop.
The result is this.

This track, which is a little over 8 minutes long, is looped into the beginning and set for continuous playback - it is perceived as endless.
In good headphones, loud conversations, phone calls in the neighborhood are muffled. The sound itself is not annoying or annoying, after a while you just stop noticing it along with sound trash 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 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 in the beginning. There was a video lasting more than seven hours in 720p quality. We ride the train and not somewhere there, but in Norway . Snow, mountains, tunnels, snow ... By the way, the video above shows 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 incomparable.
Video shot by NRK channel as a pilot project. This is essentially a documentary. This version is a selection. There is only a train and nothing more. The video was shot on a Sony XDCAM HD camera in 1080p. The original file weighs 165GB. This version encoded in 720p weighs 22GB and is freely distributed under a Creative Commons license.
If you decide to download, make sure that your system supports this file size. FAT32, for example, does not support.