[sdiy] Various colors of noise.
Tom Wiltshire
tom at electricdruid.net
Tue Mar 3 16:31:20 CET 2026
Notice that the triangle wave, the sawtooth wave, and the psuedo-random binary level noise uniform distribution (Phew! What a mouthful!) all have the same uniform probability distribution.
> On 3 Mar 2026, at 12:49, mark verbos <markverbos at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don’t know if this answers any question, but it is interesting. It explains why Buchla sampled a triangle wave hard synched to noise rather than sampling noise in the Source of Uncertainty.
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> Mark
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> <federal.jpg>
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>> On Mar 3, 2026, at 11:31, Tom Wiltshire <tom at electricdruid.net> wrote:
>>
>> +1 agree with Richie and Brian.
>>
>> The "noise colour" (frequency spectrum) and amplitude distribution are independent. It kind-of blew my mind when I first discovered this, since (in my head at least) you'd have thought that such a significant difference in the signals would be audible, but it's really not. You can make "white noise" with all of these different flavours, as Richie has done, and it'll affect the output of an S+H sampling them, but not the sound as audio.
>>
>>> On 3 Mar 2026, at 10:01, rburnett at richieburnett.co.uk wrote:
>>>
>>> If the ZIP attachment makes it through it contains five examples of "white noise" created with different amplitude distributions:
>>>
>>> 1. Gaussian distribution
>>> 2. Uniform (all amplitudes equally likely)
>>> 3. Triangular distribution
>>> 4. Two discrete levels (Digital PRBS)
>>> 5. Three discrete levels (Two digital sources added together)
>>>
>>> See if you can tell the difference by listening!
>>>
>>> -Richie,
>>>
>>>
>>> On 2026-03-03 07:21, brianw wrote:
>>>> The probability distribution of the values in a random sequence are completely independent of the frequency spectrum of those values as a signal...
>>> <noise.zip>________________________________________________________
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