Hush

A macOS menu bar app for ambient noise. Brown noise and a speech blocker — one right-click away, no browser tab required.

Features

• Menu bar native — lives in your menu bar, out of the way until you need it
• Right-click to toggle — start/stop sound without opening anything
• Left-click for controls — noise type picker, volume slider, and more
• Two noise types:
  • Brown — deep, rumbling, low-frequency rumble
  • Speech Blocker — shaped specifically to mask human voices
• Brown noise low-pass cutoff — adjustable filter from 20–500 Hz
• Smooth start and stop — audio fades in and out instead of cutting abruptly
• Light and dark mode — toggle from the popover footer
• Remembers your settings — last used noise type, volume, and appearance persist across launches

Why I built this

I've used white noise for focus and concentration for over ten years. Over that time I've bounced between various apps and browser tabs — playing brown noise here, switching to a speech blocker there. It always meant interrupting whatever I was doing to find the right tab or open the right app.

Now that I can build my own tools, I made exactly what I wanted: a small menu bar app that's always there. Right-click the icon to toggle sound. Left-click to open controls. No switching contexts, no hunting for a browser tab.

Privacy

Hush is fully offline. It requires no network connection and makes none. There are no analytics, no telemetry, no servers, and no audio files — all sounds are generated algorithmically in real time using signal processing (brown noise via leaky integration and a low-pass filter, speech blocker via pink noise from Paul Kellet's method shaped by a 10-band EQ). Nothing leaves your Mac.

You can verify this yourself: the full source is in this repo, and you can build it directly from Xcode.

Usage

Installation

Download Hush — pay what you want, $0 is fine. Unzip and move Hush.app to your /Applications folder.

Prefer GitHub? The same build is on the Releases page, or build it yourself (see below).

Requires macOS 13+. Apple notarized, so it just opens.

Building from source

Open Hush/Hush.xcodeproj in Xcode and run the Hush scheme, or build a universal release binary from the command line:

./build.sh

The result is written to dist/Hush.app.

Changelog

v1.2.0

• Removed White and Pink noise; Brown is now the default
• Fixed the spectrum bars continuing to animate after playback stops
• Bars no longer redraw while the popover is closed, saving CPU during long sessions
• Fixed popover resize glitches when switching noise types
• Fixed an audio-thread crash when changing noise type mid-playback

v1.1.0

• Redesigned popover with light and dark mode, large parameter readouts, and a mini spectrum per noise type
• Popover height animates when switching noise types

v1.0.1

• Fixed code signing and notarization in the release workflow

v1.0.0

• Initial release

License

MIT