Same boat. I find a chill streamer that doesn't talk much and plays a game I like. I set the TV to 30 minute timer and watch for ~10 minutes before falling asleep. This is similar to people that fall asleep to shows they like -- see https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurama_Sleepers/
White noise is better than nothing, but my brain won't stop generating content (thoughts) with white noise. When the TV is generating the content, my brain focuses on that, and it's mindless enough to fall asleep to. I think it has something to do with being a mentally active person forced into a passive role, like shifting the brain into low gear.
Check out the book, "Turning the Mind into an Ally" by Sakyong Mipham. I used the techniques in that book to silence those random, erratic thoughts. I fall asleep within a minute of hitting the pillow now.
When my SO is out of town, my brain generates all sorts of horrible possibilities of things that could happen to my while laying in bed, from simple home invasions to black holes suddenly appearing and consuming my right arm. Watching Futurama (I had no idea there was a whole community around it) distracts me from those invasive thoughts.
I get pareidolia from white noise. Not a lot, but enough that the 'sounds' are more distracting than mundane background sounds like TV or music that I can tune out easily.
No but I've spent a good amount of time doing vaguely sound-engineering work where I listen carefully to audio samples. I may have overtrained some pattern-recognition wetware along the way.
Even 'naturally' generated white noise (e.g. Marpac Sound Machine)? I have similar problems listening to electronically generated white noise but no problems with the Marpac.
Possibly not lab-grade white noise, just broadband audio noise in general: fans, moving water, RF static, voice codec comfort noise turned up too loud, that sort of thing.
If you grew up in a big family and got used to there always being voices and activity in the house, it can be kind of comforting just to have quiet, familiar voices as background noise.
I've been trying to go to sleep earlier for a little over a week now (I used to sleep at about 3AM-5AMish and now I'm sleeping at about 9:30PM-10:3PM0ish now). My sleep plan is turn off all the lights, open up my laptop about 30 minutes before I try and sleep and watch an episode or two of futurama on 1.23x speed. I've been getting to sleep every night since on my target time despite being on an Adderall prescription. Futurama really helps for some reason. I'm trying to build it up to the point where I don't need to watch any show to get to sleep early, but I'm not quite at that point yet.
For me it's dubbed anime, it probably takes me 1-2 weeks to make it through an entire episode.
While I work I need some noise, something, nearly anything. The complete lack of silence bothers me. I usually listen to OCRemix at work (via rainwave.cc) or 90's/00's music from when I was younger (nostalgia).
At home I will put on something like Friends (Netflix), Giant Bomb videos (giantbomb.com), or classic game play throughs (NES, SNES, Genesis) on YouTube (or Giant Bomb). For example, LaserTime did Aladdin SNES vs Aladdin Genesis side by side video and they played through NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Simpson's games on NES/SNES. Giant Bomb has a series called Vinnyvania where Vinny (one of the Giant Bomb employees) plays through all the Castlevania games and another where they play through all the fighting games and rank them. I'm not into the new games.
Just a sidenote for anyone else who might be streaming rainwave from a limited connection: it uses about 60 megabytes an hour and sounds pretty heavily compressed (only a problem on some tracks)
