Yesterday, I came across this tweet from Joe Cieplinski, the excellent bass player from the band Airplane Mode:

TIL you can ask Siri to “play white noise” on your HomePod, which is great for drowning out the massively annoying ice cream truck around the corner.

— jcieplinski (@jcieplinski) March 18, 2018

I had to try this myself:

Hey, Siri, play white noise

Siri’s response:

OK, here’s the self-titled album by White Noise

Then, Siri plays white noise, which lasts about 30 minutes.

What I found interesting about this is that Siri is actually playing a track named “White Noise” by a band called “White Noise”. This is an incredibly prescient move by the band. They’ve bottlenecked the white noise concept, intentionally or not, funneling all white noise requests into streams of their album, which, presumably, translates into revenue for White Noise.

Imagine if you created a band named Jazz and produced an album named Jazz and a track named Jazz. If the logic above holds true, every time someone says, “Hey Siri, play Jazz”, your music would get the call.

Except, even if that did work, I can’t imagine Apple or Spotify would allow that to stand. This White Noise thing is an oddity. Interesting.