[sdiy] Truly white noise

[Magnus Danielson]

From: Peter Grenader <peter at buzzclick-music.com>
Subject: Re: [sdiy] Truly white noise
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 21:15:54 -0700
Message-ID: <BD00F509.15367%peter at buzzclick-music.com>

> 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.

I agree fully and this is the point I was trying to make earlier out.

People need noise, that's for sure. There are several issues about how you
make noise and the analouge onces have their issues and the digital onces have
their issues. I just want people to have a solution which is more than good
enought and works well enought for them to get away with it. Less hassel and
more time to work on other things, like...

> Now, making a lowpass gate that doesn't leak - now THAT's a different story!

Exactly. There are gazzilions of things we can do better. Some is much more
important than others. The art of noise-making should not be such a hard issue
for people to handle.

Maybe I should make a webpage with a number of schematics, theory and handy
tables?

Cheers,
Magnus - now on vacation, so there is some time to do things on

> - 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 
> 
>