Tool: Marpac Dohm Classic White Noise Sound Machine, $44.95

Features:

• Adjustable volume and tone
• Dampens barking
• Comes in four color options: black, white, gray, and tan
• Makes falling asleep as easy as pushing a button

My husband is a violinist. He practices in the early morning, before we both go to work at regular jobs where we make money and don’t make art. My husband often plays the same violin pieces over and over. This is his ritual. He frequently plays Bach. Bach is hard to play, which is one of the reasons he chooses to repeatedly play it. These are for his “chops.” He plays the sections he most struggles with, which results in me frequently hearing music that is struggling to be played. It sounds like the sound my lungs make when I am running up a very steep hill.

I used to be able to block out noise, including my husband’s Bach ritual, but several years ago I became inexplicably obsessed with sitting in silence. I have always prided myself on being a hearty person who can sit on the floor for hours, eat anything, sleep anywhere, including in airport chairs, and work doggedly with meager tools in loud, inopportune environments. Thus, my desire for silence caught me off guard. I was ashamed of this desire. I did not want to want silence but I did in fact want it. And I would never ask my husband to stop playing his Bach, because the morning Bach ritual is one of his very favorite things.

This unexpected need for silence drove me into an internet hole of white-noise-machine consumer research. My research lasted for days. In the hole I found out that there are essentially two kinds of white noise machines: ones that are basically just speakers that loop electronic recordings of static, and ones that possess a series of small internal fans that physically move the air in a given room around in a pattern that disrupts and counteracts sound waves. Everybody on the internet agrees that the second kind—the fan-generated, air-moving, sound-wave-disrupting kind—is a far superior white noise machine, and that within this superior model there is a superior brand: the Marpac Dohm Classic.

Invented in 1962, the Marpac Dohm Classic is beloved. It has more than eight thousand positive reviews on Amazon. In one review a woman describes how the Marpac Dohm Classic saved her marriage. This woman had an elderly dog. When the dog became old, it began to have delusions in the middle of the night. The dog barked at the delusions. The dog was not barking because it had to pee. When the barking began, the woman thought it had to pee, but...