posted 30 May 2012 01:44            

Recently Kyma was analyzing a white noise signal in the spectrum editor and I realized by listening to the first 10 frequencies, that these are following, like partials, the harmonic structure from music instruments (as integer multiples of the fundamental frequency).
Since the white noise is generated synthetically I expected a non-harmonic structure and that the distribution of all frequencies would be more balanced spaced.
But maybe such a sound would be too overwhelming, having too much energy in the lower frequencies area? Does such a sound exists even though?

posted 30 May 2012 10:35            

When you listen to an individual track in the Spectrum Editor, you are effectively listening to a bandpass filter on the noise, a filter centered at the frequency of that track. The bandpass filters are centered at integer multiples of the frequency whose period is the analysis window length.

So you are absolutely correct about the harmonic relationship between the tracks (good ears)! One of the challenges of spectral analysis / resynthesis is the accurate representation and recreation of the noisy bits.

But the Noise module itself does not have any harmonic relationships or periodicity. It is generated by a random number generator having a uniform distribution. What you are hearing is the spacing of the analysis' bandpass filters.

posted 01 June 2012 13:45            

You may want to take a look at my talk at KISS 2011 The Wire Between.
I give quite a bit of time about how easily noise integrity gets destroyed by analysis/re-synthesis, and how this is one of the reasons for the metallic/phasey sound you can get if you are not careful.
http://kiss2011.symbolicsound.com/videos-photos/

Note that the sound compression on the video give most of the sound the metallic/phasey effect so the examples aren't all that clear.

Pete