Colorful World of Noises

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6c/The_Colors_of_Noise.png/330px-The_Colors_of_Noise.png

Amazing thing, the sound is, Gentle and rhythmic can lower your heart beat and stress. Musical and it creates chartbuster songs, soothing and it make babies sleep but abrupt and loud can shatter the glasses and mirror even. Louder decibels can damage your hearing capacity permanently.

Sound has whole spectrum vibrational frequencies to propagate energy through a medium. I was in a club once and what I considered loud noise was music to others. As a matter of choice loud music played by DJs in events where you can even hear yourself is noise to me.

Noise

Noise is simply unwanted sound around you. It’s a matter of perspective from individual to individual. Though theoretically there is not difference between sound and noise both are vibrations in the medium like air, water or wood but What I perceive as music, you may consider it as noise. Or, in real world any random fluctuations in frequency of sound which may have not rhythm to it, can be considered as noise.

More popular variation and widely accepted definition is the leftover residual sound which can be either a feedback loop or instruments induced just like a hiss sound during silence time in recording of an audio is Noise.

but, I never would have thought something as fundamental as sound or noise can be associated with color.

Color coding the noise is not actually seeing sounds but rather associated the color to a type of noise in a sound spectrum just like light spectrum which depict certain properties. Let's see or listen, now I am confused...

Types of Noises

White Noise - is synonymous to white light, just like white light is made up of all the different colors in spectrum. Same way, combining all the frequencies of sound spectrum playing all at once is white noise. Human ear can perceive sound frequencies from as low as 20Hz to as high as 20,000Hz. So, it’s like hearing 20,000 tones altogether as same time. White noise sounds like static in noise of CRT TV or like 1000 people talking simultaneously. Natural white noise examples can be rain, waterfall, ocean waves etc.

Sample of White Noise(If using headphones, please reduce the volume)

Pink Noise- In laymen language pink noise is white noise with bass added. It sounds little deep and without much hiss. Technically, it’s like reducing the volume of successive octaves to compensate higher extra frequencies. Thus, lower frequencies have more energy and sounds like deep white noise.

Sample of Pink Noise(If using headphones, please reduce the volume)

Brown Noise - is named after scientist Robert Brown and not brown. Brown noise is like adding bass to Pink Noise. It is considerably deeper than White Noise. Brown noise is produced by adding random ness factor based on particle Brownian movement pattern to each successive sample from the previous.

Sample of Brown Noise(If using headphones, please reduce the volume)

From this point on, my understanding of technicalities started to collapse but I have included them for completeness. I have also included samples to relate them to one other.

Blue Noise - power per hertz is proportional to its frequency, which means that the power and energy of the signal increases as frequency increases and each successive octave increases by three decibels.

Sample of Blue Noise(If using headphones, please reduce the volume)

Violet Noise - increase in energy at a rate of 6 dB per octave. It is kind of opposite to Brown Noise which is more weighted at the bottom octaves. It may sound like open tap to some.

Sample of Violet Noise(If using headphones, please reduce the volume)

Grey Noise - a noise that feels perceptually flat across all frequencies in the human hearing range. The result is that grey noise contains all frequencies with equal loudness, as opposed to white noise, which contains all frequencies with equal energy.

Sample of Grey Noise(If using headphones, please reduce the volume)

Other type of noises

Red Noise - A signal or process with a frequency spectrum such that the spectral energy density is proportional to the reciprocal of the frequency squared (1/f^2).

Black Noise - is effectively silence with a tiny bit of random noise at some frequencies and some noise above 20kHz. Black noise is a term commonly associated with video and film where it refers to no video, thus blacked out video.

Green Noise - "Green noise. The mid-frequency component of white noise, used in halftone dithering. Bounded Brownian noise. Vocal spectrum noise used for testing audio circuits. Joseph S. Wisniewski wrote that "green noise", as marketed by producers of ambient sound effects recordings" - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_noise

Uses

Since, White noise contains all the frequencies playing together, it is widely used to mask sounds. This is especially helpful in loud areas like factories, workshops and production units. One other use can be playing white noise at the location of distraction like office or while sleeping. Playing white noise will drown the office sounds into the fuzzy noise. People get used to it quite easily, Hearing White noise for some time will make it fade away with all the distracting noises. It works as a background filter.

I think noise can be useful despite of their annoying nature where they creep in the perfect music or song. While recording they are tried to be kept minimum. There are still some areas where these noises are proven to be very useful and have daily practical uses. I have tried most of them and they have amazing soothing effect. If you need to work with focus in distracting environment, they work much better than soundproof headphones. However, each one of us may like different color of sound like my personal favorite is Grey Noise. What’s yours?

Footnote

My channel :https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChlqyi2M5ywy85FSHI0i-tg 

Other Articles: https://azblogs4u.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_7.html

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Credits

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Articles

https://www.nosleeplessnights.com/what-is-white-noise-whats-all-the-fuss-about/

https://science.howstuffworks.com/question47.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_noise

https://www.bustle.com/articles/174644-what-is-pink-noise-you-might-sleep-better-with-this-sound-playing-according-to-science

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_noise

https://www.livescience.com/38547-what-is-brown-noise.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_noise

https://www.soundofsleep.com/2017/07/18/white-pink-brown-noise-whats-difference/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise

https://www.livescience.com/38583-what-is-blue-noise.html

https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/greyNoiseGenerator.php

https://www.techopedia.com/definition/27897/violet-noise

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_noise

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/red_noise

Images

Wikimedia, Pixabay

Sound

Wikimedia