audiosampling

Hi HN — I'm Stéphane, the maker of BidWix (and myNoise, if that rings a bell).

I'm a sound designer. For years, I've licensed sounds and music to people whose budgets I couldn't see. You send a quote, close the laptop, and spend the next hour wondering: was that embarrassingly low, or did I just kill the deal? The core problem is simple: when there's no market price — think a logo, a photo license, a domain name — neither side wants to go first. So both bluff, both guess, and the final price often has nothing to do with what would have been fair.

BidWix fixes this with a sealed-bid mechanism. Both sides submit their honest number in secret. If there's overlap, the deal price is the geometric mean of the two — the point where both sides gain by the same proportional factor. If there's no overlap, no deal, no hard feelings.

If the seller's floor is $100 and the buyer's ceiling is $900, the geometric mean gives $300: both sides gained by a factor of 3.

The mechanism is also incentive-compatible: since you only get one shot and never see the other side's number, your best move is to submit your true boundary. Bluffing can only cost you the deal.

It's free, no account needed, and intentionally minimal. Happy to discuss the game theory, the geometric mean choice, or anything else.

Noise cancelling headphones still have a residual noise, that you will hear, because our hearing has an incredible dynamic range. Adding a faint background noise of your choice, to cover that residual noise, is a good idea.

Then, these crafted noises do exist because of the exact nature of the life around you. For many people, the "life around you" is what they want to escape, exactly.

Exactly. Plus, creating your own "audible" comfort zone, is very tricky. A given sound that some people like, e.g. frogs in a nature soundscape, can be the sound other dislike, or are even afraid of. Offering level control over every audible elements in a soundscape is very important, and not available on YouTube.

Thanks for the kind mention!

I am Stephane, the person behind that website/project. I see a lot of people having concerns about the title - Background Sound Canceller - and they are right. That title is not mine, but poster's own.

I describe my project as "Background Noise Generators", or sometimes as as "Non-Distracting Noises and Music".

They are not sound cancellers but sound maskers.

The idea is to create a noise you like, to mask a sound that you don't want to hear. Your colleagues, tinnitus, ... anything.

Because these noise generators are designed to be non-distracting, there is a big chance that your brain will not even hear them after a couple of minutes... but they will keep masking the nuisance you wanted to het rid of in the first place. That is the magic exploited by the project. Create these sonic "focus bubbles".

Happy listening.

Iconic movie Blade Runner (1984) takes place in a dystopian future which was imagined to have happened by November 2019. So, I had the plan to come with a sonic tribute on that date. And here we are. You can play with the varied tracks - even animate the sliders. Among others, you will be able to recreate the mood of the opening scene in the original movie, and classic Vangelis moods. As the different stems loop with different timings, the whole creates ever changing variations. The iconic Yamaha CS-80 sounds have been recreated using the modern Moog One - an all-analog synthesiser too. This soundscape goes really low in frequency, good headphones or a subwoofer, are highly recommended. Enjoy!

Composite generators are web specials at the moment, but as soon as the mobile app developer - who reads us here on hacker news, I am sure - finished struggling with the Android app, he will probably implement these composite generators on the mobile apps too. It shouldn't be too difficult, it's more a data parsing issue, than actual programming.

November 2019 is the goal, of course!