[kmort]

I was quite a fan of listening to pink noise at work but found after a while that I started to get aural hallucinations. It felt like my mind was finding patterns in the noise that weren't there.

Probably harmless, but it did make me wonder about any lasting effects of extended exposure.

[jrockway]

Probably OK. People often see weird things when they are in sensory deprivation chambers. When you have no sensory input, your brain makes some up so that it has something to do. Not harmful.

(Unfortunately, I never get hallucinations from sensory deprivation. Sigh.)

[thomasballinger]

I get exactly this with white noise, subtle chime sounds on a pentatonic scale. It made me want to do the realtime frequency analysis to see if I wasn't imagining it.

[dwich]

I get this effect too with white and pink noise. I'm able to minimize it by playing an additional audio track with a predictable pattern, like ocean waves. That seems to satisfy the pattern-matching part of my brain.