The Colours of Noise - White

White noise is famous.

Even if you’re not familiar with the noise colour spectrum, chances are you’ve heard of white noise. It’s the one we associate with the image of an untuned TV or static on the radio. Songs have been written in its name, and babies have fallen asleep to the sound of its soothing waves.

But you know what? We’ve got it all wrong.

What we commonly think of as white noise is more often pink noise. Sometimes it’s even confused with blue, green, grey or violet noise. White noise has a pretty low profile, so it’s easily mistaken for other signals.

What is white noise?

Mix all the colours of the rainbow together and you get white light. Combine every band of the noise spectrum and you get white noise.

White noise simply describes a uniform mix of random energy at every frequency. In audio engineering and physics it is sometimes called low-information noise, meaning that it has an indistinct character. We commonly associate it with the sound of static, but white noise can be found in a range of places.

You might hear it in the background of an old recording or when your phone or radio has bad reception. We hear white noise in percussion, like the gravelly sound of a snare drum. It is often described using words like hiss, crackle and fuzz.

Using colours to distinguish noise.

White noise is pretty bland as far as colours go, but the important thing to remember is that white noise provides the basic principle from which the entire noise colour spectrum stems.

If white noise describes a random mix of frequencies, any sound with different frequency components can be called coloured noise. Just as we get different coloured paint by adding different pigments to a white base, other kinds of signals can be amplified or added to white noise to give it more discernible qualities.

We’re particularly attentive to white noise at HVAC Attenuation, which is to say, we don’t want to hear it. White noise is that sickening buzz or whine we associate with loud machinery: in fact, the word noise actually comes from the Latin word for nausea. Our attenuators are designed for silence, reducing interference from unwanted white noise.

To hear more about how we do this, get in touch with the team by clicking below.