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Lets talk about noise =]
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| DJ Robby Rox |
I was in my first class of critical discourse a few weeks back (speech) and my teacher basically demonized noise. She went on talking about airconditioners, heaters, humming and how all these things can really become disenganging to an audience.
I never spoke my opinion on noise because it had no relevance in the class.
But recently I've become obsessed with it.
Noise really is weird.
You can't pitch it, you can't structure any real basic sounds with it, but noise is like a spice than can have a drastically huge impact on simple sounds.
You can make a smooth sound rough, a rough sound smooth, you can make euphoric grooves, winds, etc.
I guess my question is what the hell is noise? Is it a soundwave? If so why can't you change the pitch of it?
Where does something like white or pink noise come from?
Like what is happening that generates that sound? Is there a fundamental form of noise? What is it (white?), are other forms just manipulations of it?
Noise just really is an intriguing and mysterious aspect of sound for me. Is there any form of noise where you can change the pitch? If no, why not?
What the hell is noise lol |
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| T-Soma |
Wikipedia has a pretty clear a simple explanation.
I also guess you are refering to white noise:
White noise is a signal (or process), named by analogy to white light, with equal energy per cycle (hertz). This produces a flat frequency spectrum in linear space.
In other words, the signal has equal power in any band of a given bandwidth (power spectral density). For example, the range of frequencies between 40 Hz and 60 Hz contains the same amount of sound power as the range between 4000 Hz and 4020 Hz has. |
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| palm |
noise in general is defined as something u dont want to hear! period.
white noise and pink noise on the other hand is mathemathical generated signals and isnt realy noise imo (beacuse i like it).
white noise sounds brighter beacuse it has the same amount of energy in each freq of the frequency specter.
pinknoise has the same amount of energy in each decade compared. therefore it will be most energy in the top on whitenoise simply beacuse there are more frequences avaliable in one decade.
while from 10-20-30Hz u have only 10HZ avaliable in each decade, you have in 1000-2000-3000Hz, 1000Hz avaliable freqs to fill with energy when ur using white noise.
pink noise on the other hand puts the same energy into those 1000Hz avaliable between 1000-2000Hz as it does with the 10Hz avaliable between 10-20Hz. This means the amplitude while be lower on each freq the higher you go in the specter.
terrible english i know and it might not be completely right but this is the way Ive learned it. and yeah whitenoise with an lfo-d BP-filter is success! |
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| Storyteller |
| pink noise is just white noise with a 3dB roll-off per octave (an octave is exactly a doubling of the frequency... 10 to 20Hz is an octave and 3000 to 6000Hz... etc). |
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| airwalker1 |
i love noise mainly because if played around with enough you can generate some awsome sounds.
and you need some type of noise the help build up your tracks.
as far as real life noise is concernd in does my nut. |
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| kitphillips |
Just wanted to make a drunk post in the drunk thread.
Storyteller is the only person who has made any sense here.
Zaum. |
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| palm |
| i like the noise from highway behind my apartment. should sample it. |
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| mzvirbulis |
Hey great question! im glad someone bought it up.
Here's a link to noise.....
Noise Oscillator's |
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| palm |
| sound #6 is pretty mental there. |
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| airwalker1 |
| quote: | Originally posted by kitphillips
Just wanted to make a drunk post in the drunk thread.
Storyteller is the only person who has made any sense here.
Zaum. |
try the fuzz in the buzz thats your head |
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| DigiNut |
You're confusing completely different types of noise. Palm is correct in that the only unifying characteristic between them is that they are generally unwanted sounds.
White noise (and its derivative, pink noise) is one special case that has a few creative uses. It has completely random amplitude, giving it equal energy at every frequency, much like white light. It therefore has no fundamental frequency and thus no pitch, so logically the pitch cannot be changed simply by resampling. However, you can give it a pitch by filtering it, same way you can give white light a colour by shining it through tinted glass. You can "change" the pitch by varying the filter characteristics.
White noise is electrical noise that comes from a combination of shot noise and thermal noise in an electric circuit. For a recording engineer, this is always undesirable as it can interfere with recordings from low-amplitude devices like microphones, and is difficult to filter out (it's random!). Most of the time it sounds like hiss because the low and ultra-high frequencies don't transmit as easily.
You ask "is it a sound wave" - it actually isn't. It's an electrical signal and only becomes a sound wave once it gets amplified and pumped out a speaker. The sound does not exist in nature. Yeah yeah, it kind of sounds like rushing water, but it isn't.
There's also ground noise (hum) in AC circuits. If the current draw is consistent then you often can filter this. It's always at the line frequency which is at 50/60 Hz.
Air conditioners, heaters, fans, and so on, are producing mechanical noise, not electrical noise. It's not random, it's periodic, proportional to the speed of the motor. It's also affected by vibrations with the container or surrounding structure, which gives the noise low-frequency oscillations that sound like "beats" or "swells". That's what makes them so headache-inducing and difficult to ignore. I've never heard of anyone using this kind of noise in a creative sense, especially not in music production. Aside from the unifying characteristic of being an unwanted sound, it has no relationship to white noise.
I'm glad for your sake that you kept your mouth shut in class, because if your teacher was talking about air conditioners and you'd piped up with this discussion of white noise in sound synthesis, you'd have sounded pretty pompous and stupid.
Hope that helps. |
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