He took a Friday-evening train to Washington from Newark. He still wasn’t able to listen to music, but his non-Apple MP3 player was loaded with a track of pink noise – white noise frequency-shifted toward the bass end and capable of neutralizing every ambient sound the world could throw at him – and by donning big cushioned headphones and angling himself toward the window and holding a Bernhard novel close to his face, he was able to achieve complete privacy until the train stopped in Philly.

Jonathan Franzen: Freedom, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2010, S. 349.