RITUAL sounds

The chapter on RITUAL in Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy opens with my telling about how I worked on translating Marriage of Figaro for my production of that show in 2002: I would put on Steve Roach's Dreamtime Return album and let its pulses take me across the line into the circle where we work. As soon as that first urging emerged from the silence a little switch was tripped in my brain, and I worked.

Many authors use music as not just background but as active triggers for their writing, often selected specifically for the tenor of the writing they're working on.  (Michael Cunningham went with a lot of Philip Glass when he was writing The Hours; Glass then scored the movie version.)

Sometimes, though, you need not-music, and that's what I've got for you today: websites that will provide you with a background that won't distract you with lyrics, melodies, or most importantly, stopping and starting.

If you're in the mood to pay, you can consider hipstersound.com. The range of sounds is not wide, mostly hipster coffee shops as advertised, but the sound quality is very good.  Full disclosure: I have not paid for premium membership and so cannot speak to those sounds behind the wall.

Two good free sound generators are A Soft Murmur and Noisli. Both give you control over the mix of sound: rain, fireside, waves, wind, et al. There are minor differences in sound options and in features, but both offer timers and make excellent companions for TASK AVOIDANCE.

My favorite sound site is MyNoise. It's mostly free, but for a one-time donation you gain access to certain soundsets plus a couple of other benefits.  I do recommend paying for this one.  There's a wide menu of soundsets in multiple categories, and every soundset lets you play with the levels of the constituent generators. It's a pretty amazing site.

So whether you're a forest/bird/insects kind of person, or chatter/coffee shop dude or a thunder/rain/singing bowl type, you can now create the appropriate sound environment to Draw the Circle and enter your RITUAL workspace. One less excuse to avoid work...