What's that noise?
April 27, 2012
Words like ‘Sound’ and ‘Noise’ get used interchangeably, but it's worth making some distinctions.
When we say that a room is ‘noisy’, we aren’t necessarily referring to the energy distribution across frequency - or even to the amplitude/loudness/volume of the place. Noise is contextual. If I’m trying to hear a call on my phone, the string quartet playing at the front of the room is too noisy. So would be the shushing of the other audience members, who are irritated by what they hear as my noisy conversation. We are both hearing noise as a distraction, regardless of the physical characteristics of the event.
‘Sound’ is one medium that can be ‘Noisy’. ‘Noise’ in turn can be defined as a subset of sound, a very particular phenomena where all frequencies are active with equal energy. The opposite of Noise - now there’s a question to ponder. What about a single sine wave? A single frequency, played for infinite duration at consistent amplitude?
The opposite of noise could also be silence, but silence is not the absence of noise.
The loudest thing we call The Big Bang, the beginning of the universe conceived as an expansion from a singularity. But there was no sound at the big bang, because there was no air and sound cannot travel in a vacuum. There would have been highly complex waveforms, emerging from quantum froth as the fundamental particles established themselves and the relationships that shape our current universe. It is true that a waveform in one medium can be represented as a wave in any other medium, which would allow a sonic model of the early moments to be produced, in theory. Who knows what that would sound like....
Humans have developed the ability to perceive electromagnetic activity within the narrow frequency band the we call Visible light. There is a similar privileged frequency range for energy transmitted as waves through air - what we call sound, which is intercepted by the refined mechanics of the human ear, transduced into electrical impulses and interpreted by our brains to provide an understanding of the environment around us. We call Noise anything that interferes with this process.
When I think of the noisiest things I’ve ever heard, I don’t think of message interference or cultural intrusion. I think of the loudest sounds I’ve been exposed to. I remember one morning in Paris, tired and still a little drunk, unable to find a cup of coffee but finally able to board a train. I walked down the platform and on either side were gargantuan diesel engines each about 300 feet high and half a mile long. Walking between them was like edging through a narrow gorge, where the air itself had a viscosity created by the manipulation of the engines. I couldn’t call it the ‘sound’ of the engines, just as I can’t call it ‘hearing’. I felt that with each step I was rising just a few inches off the ground, that the air was sufficiently dense that I could float just a little bit. Maybe how I imagine floating in the dead sea would feel. The moment was a combination of the physical reality of the sound, the human attunement to sound waves, and a fluid state of mind consistent with irrational interpretations of the moment.