[sdiy] Truly white noise

[Peter Grenader]

No two bits:

Agreed. My opinion is that one can spend days/years/eons making the flatest
of flat white noise and in the the end - would it amount to a hill of beans?
If it wasn't flat would it be less  musical than however musical white noise
could possibly be considered to be in the first place?  Would it  it color a
source of randomness to the point of  un-usability?  My gut feeling:
hardly.

If it wasn't pure, would it defeature the instrument's character?  Hardly.
Would it GIVE the machine character?  Absolutely.

In my opinion, flat white noise is not the synth designer's holy grail.
Now, making a lowpass gate that doesn't leak - now THAT's a different story!

- Peter


Robotboy8 at aol.com wrote:

In light of recent threads I have a few general observations about white
noise.  They might be wrong - in which case I'm sure I'll be corrected - and
a few of these points are probably common knowledge, but I feel that some on
here need reminding.

*Most people only need something that sounds like white noise.  For
instance, a detuned radio.  No, it isn't white, but it sounds good enough to
mix with a VCO before filtering.

*White noise is only necessary (truly white, I mean) for testing, scopes,
etc.  Most other applications - well, see above.

*Obtaining truly white noise is difficult because most components
(amplifying, etc) will color the spectrum.

*To get truly white noise, why don't we just build massive amounts of
sinewave oscillators, record them all tuned hundredths of a cent off and
phased slightly off from one another, then layer that recording over them
all tuned an increment higher until we have literally every frequency we can
generate?

*Would this truly white noise not be loopable at whatever smallest number
ratio all oscillators have in common?

*Truly white noise would have to be scalable - containing all frequencies in
the same amplitude, such that if you pitchshifted it up some it would still
be white, because all frequencies a human can hear are still present (those
that were subaudible or above audible before are now shifted into audible
range as others are shifted out).

Am I right in these?  Just trying to place myself and help anyone else, not
to mention spark some interesting conversation.

       -eric