From white noise to incidental ambience – ‘noise’ plays an important role in sound design, and could be the secret weapon for bringing your tracks to life
The term ‘noise’, in general use, can often have negative connotations, implying something unwanted or unpleasant. But as music makers we shouldn’t think of it as such.
Many musicians throughout the past century have explored the use of everyday noise as a credible musical instrument – from Luigi Russolo’s orchestral-industrial experiments in the 1910s, through to the ’40s musique concrete movement, and brought into the mainstream through the sonic experiments of Phil Spector, the Beach Boys and The Beatles in the ’50s and ’60s.
Noise is even an established genre in its own right. While music tagged with genres like noise, noise rock or drone is still thought of as experimental, it’s not hard to see elements of it creeping into the mainstream, particularly in cinematic soundtracks from the likes of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross or the prepared piano scores of Hauschka.
Whatever the context, ‘noise’ is a powerful and useful building block within sound design and music production, capable of adding tension, texture, character and movement to our tracks. And thanks to modern software techniques, noise has never been easier to access and experiment with.
Before we get stuck into the hows and whys of using noise in music production, it’s worth taking a quick step back in order to define what, exactly, we’re talking about when we refer to ‘noise’. Obviously, all sound is technically noise, although generally we tend to differentiate between intentional sound, such as direct speech or music, and unwanted, unpleasant or incidental sound, which we refer to as noise.
Within music making, noise can have several different definitions. Synths often come equipped with a dedicated noise generator or an oscillator with a noise mode.
Generally speaking, these tools are designed to create white noise. Standard synth oscillators operate at a certain frequency, with an audible pitch defined by the fundamental frequency, accompanied by varied combinations of overtones, depending on the waveshape. By contrast, a white noise generator creates sound at an equal level right across the frequency spectrum. Just as white light contains all colours across the visual spectrum, leading us to perceive it as colourless, white noise is flat across the frequency spectrum so it has no definable pitch. Because of this, noise is a very useful sonic raw building block that we can chisel away at using filters and amplitude modulation.
There are a few slight variations to white noise. The most common you’re likely to encounter is pink noise, which decreases in level as it goes up the frequency spectrum, meaning that the higher frequencies are less harsh and lower ones seem ampl
