Even though we ca n’t see it , we know that the scratchy trailer made by a radio between frequency has a colour . blanched noiseis just one in a spectrum of good people of colour audio locomotive engineer practice to categorize continuous noise signals . But why do we use gloss to describe sound , and where does white noise fit out into the auditory rainbow ?
Sound is delimit as thevibration of particlescaused by a mechanical waving , but the terminal figure " disturbance " refers to something more specific . Just like thevisual noisethat disrupts an otherwise percipient image , noise in audio engineering is used to describe anything interfere with the intended sound . This could include the crepitation of a record instrumentalist , traffic in the background of a movie picture , or atmospheric static on the radio . AsThe Atlanticexplains , the latter of these would be conceive acolored stochasticity , because the signal it produce is constant and uniform .
White noise is the uniform admixture ofevery frequency detectableby the human ear . This is where thecolor analogycomes in . In the color spectrum , lily-white lightness is the sum of every color in the rainbow , and single colors can be dribble from it . It makes good sense then that we employ black noise to describe what ’s essentially secretiveness , just like the gloss black refer to the absence of ignitor . The color format caught on for other noises in the spectrum , but from here each signal ’s relationship to its actual coloring material gets less scientific .
Pink noise , for lesson , is just livid noise whose eminent frequencies have been lowered in chroma . harmonize toThe Atlantic , this has made it atrendy choicefor relaxing sound generators in recent years ( if a randomness could ever be considered " voguish " ) . For people suffer fromtinnitus , or a constant sonority in the ears , it can be a pleasant substitute treatment to the harsher - sounding plain white noise that ’s often used .
Blue noiseis essentially the inverse of pink , resulting in a high - peddle sound standardized to the hiss of falling piddle . And then there ’s brown noise , which oddly enough is n’t advert after the colour but the Scottish scientistRobert Brown . plentitude of colors in between , from violet to orange , have also been used to report specific dissonance signal , but these are less widely recognized .
