I have developed a habit of carrying around two or three gratitude objects in my left jeans front pocket. They would get transferred absent-mindedly from pocket to pocket when changing jeans or shorts. Recently, there was a pocket check failure before laundry chores. Now. There is a loose gratitudes that had traveled from pocket to washer to loose in the dryer.
The object is a miniature black metal carabiner. Cyclic machine murmur is the constant. The ting, the louder drop, the multiple variations of the scratch, the sliding between the blades. What an interesting way to sit in silliness. Not sure why this type of unpredictable and random noise is soothing and not irritating. Perhaps a music theorist can explain the intricacies of calculating irritating vs calming sound.
Research Says
The carabiner in the dryer is comforting because it’s unpredictable but bounded. You know it’s going to make noise—the only question is when and what kind. The brain finds that kind of controlled randomness satisfying rather than threatening.”
Slam poetry, bardcore, and hard rock share a quality of pushing toward you — they demand a response, they impose a rhythm your body either accepts or resists. The carabiner asks nothing. It just occasionally announces itself and then goes quiet again.
There’s also the context. The dryer is domestic, familiar, safe. The sound is embedded in an activity you understand completely. Nothing about it requires decoding. Your nervous system can relax around it.
Music theorists would point to something called stochastic resonance — the idea that a small amount of random noise can actually enhance perception and create a kind of pleasant background engagement for the brain. The carabiner is doing that accidentally.
Also: the dryer has a rhythm underneath the randomness — the tumbling cycle, the consistent hum. The carabiner improvises over a steady beat. That’s actually the opposite of bardcore, which removes the steady beat entirely.