Dump your white noise machine! Ditch that "relaxing sounds of nature" app. After all, you are a Bay Area urbanite, and can do way better than that, with the Sound City Project's 18 different sounds of SF.
Ha ha, yeah, get it out of your system. "Is one of them a screaming homeless guy?" "Is one of them someone taking a crap in a SoMa alley?" "Is one of them a tech bro ruining San Francisco with banal conversation?" No, none of those (hey, maybe you should make your own! Email me if you do). The Sound City sounds are lovely and soothing and might, for just a moment, make you forget that we live in a place where people shit on the sidewalk either verbally or literally.
Creative folks David Vale, Rick van Mook and Caco Teixeira 3-D printed a custom "soundhead," to which they attached four Countryman omnidirectional mics and a Zoom H6 recorder (you can see how they did it here). Then they went to six international cities, at which they recorded the ambient sound of notable areas. They visited and recorded 18 places in SF, including Lombard Street, the Lands End Rocks, Alamo Square, and City Hall.
The sounds are surprisingly relaxing, exactly the kind of white noise someone who choses to live in a city might prefer over "babbling stream" or whatever that thing your grandma got you from Sharper Image puts out. You can check out all the sounds here, just click through the "Play" button until you get to the list of locations, then start listening away.
