How can noises (like white noise) have colors?
Looking at Simply Noise, I am struck that it not only has white noise, which I always assumed was some random colloquial term for background noise, but also pink noise and brown noise.
What makes noise pink? Or brown? White? Is there blue noise? Purple noise? Can I get an entire Crayola box worth of noise?
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11 Answers
I have a white noise app on my phone that has noises of all the colours you mentioned in your question. Wikipedia has a page on it that’s a rather fun read. My favourites are the Purple/Violet and White noises, the others feel weird :s
Reading the Wiki article, it sounds like the color associations are just arbitrarily assigned names for different sound spectra rather than anything organically connected with it.
Also do a google search on SYNASTHESIA – specifically look up SOUND—>COLOR synasthesia.
It’s a fascinating aspect of human nature.
@elbanditoroso I thought of that too but that is a specific, and as you say, fascinating neurological condition.
Indigenous Shaman claim the ability to hear colors and see sounds. I’ve heard claims where they describe a humming chant as a purple ribbon floating through the air.
There are no actual colors attached to various sounds, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were? If we could see a symphony?
@marinelife At some time in their lives most electrical engineers have designed or built color organs as a fun project. A specific color is lit when a certain frequency is heard. The brightness of the colored light is a function of the sound intensity. I did a 4 channel one back in the stone age. Now I’m sure there are 20, 50, 100 channel units available.
@LuckyGuy Wasn’t the music/language in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, that the spaceship made, based on colors and tones too?
Pink noise is good for tuning stereo systems. All frequencies at constant level. White noise is all frequencies at random levels.
@Kardamom Yes. They started off with 5 tones. The fourth note was exactly half the frequency of the third. That rule would work for any civilization. The other three tones were “Earth based” which disappointed me. I did not check to see if the frequencies of the light colors were a multiple of the tones. That would have been cool!
How is it that a person can be feeling blue? Have you ever been green with envy? I once met a man with a black heart. I was once so angry that I saw red, really red.
Where do these associations come from. Why are they universally understood, beyond language?
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