What Does Perlin Noise Sound Like?

That said, after about 15 to 30s of attentive, continuous listening, it started making me increasingly uneasy, as I perceived the sound as being extremely oppressive and ominous, in a very chthonian way. I'm not going to try to listen to that any longer because I'm half sure that could almost turn into a panic attack of sorts or something. Really unsettling.

The second, fractal one didn't produce that effect unless I turned the volume way up, and even then, not as much.

Kerrick|8 years ago

I can't remember where I found it, but I rather enjoy this version:

play -c2 -n synth whitenoise band -n 100 24 band -n 300 100 gain +20

Kenji|8 years ago

My initial reaction was like "Oh, like white noise!"

I could not have been more wrong. There is very clear structure in Perlin Noise. Great write-up and I learned something.

jjoonathan|8 years ago

The article doesn't adjust for the inherent lowpass/highpass/aliasing behavior of function parameter rate vs sample rate, which is responsible for most of the audible difference, especially the similarities to real life low-passed-noise situations (airplane cabin, high building) noted by the author. Still, I agree, you can hear some residual tones!

Spectra of the 3 noise samples: http://imgur.com/a/gaiVm

I haven't read up on perlin noise recently enough to know whether that's inherent to its structure or whether there's a more mundane explanation like distortion or encoding tomfoolery.

Sharlin|8 years ago

Perlin noise was explicitly designed to give a smooth, "natural" noise pattern; its spectral energy distribution is by design completely different from white noise. Makes sense that it sounds very different as well :)

andai|8 years ago

I've heard this before! In some Nine Inch Nails tracks. I always thought it was white noise + bandpass + clipping or distortion.

shawnz|8 years ago

> I always thought it was white noise + bandpass

That would be equivalent to this approach, right?

hammock|8 years ago

Didn't really understand how he got to it, but would be interesting to hear this noise source across the larger spectrum (not just the low freqs)

It might sound/be more natural/fractal than pure white noise (+LPF), I can't tell. But it won't work to drown out office chatter because its the high freqs there that matter.

slaymaker1907|8 years ago

It might be interesting to use Perlin noise to craft a melody by mapping the reals onto a musical scale.

In particular, it seems like it would have some nice properties for melodies since it will keep the melody in a comfortable range and won't throw in a bunch of large leaps.

blue1|8 years ago

To me it sounds like the ships background noise in Star Trek.

joshu|8 years ago

Does this use Perlin noise to generate the PCM values?

If so, what would it look like to use Perlin noise as the input to an inverse FFT function?

martyvis|8 years ago

LOL. I just finished putting up a pergola with a clear polycarbonate roof. The recommendation is to apply a foam adhesive tape to the purlins (battens) to prevent noise caused by movement of the sheets from thermal expansion. Ihttps://www.bunnings.com.au/suntuf-access-25mm-x-20m-purlin-... - I thought it was a strange topic for HN ;-)

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