The Color of Noise: What Do Hues Have to Do with Sound?

scientificamerican.com

34 points·pobeda··6 comments

There’s even a black noise, and it’s no joke mathematically: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/123347/constructing-black...

This was fun but really short ... I must have missed the part where it explained the correlation between the color and the noise pattern. Why is it "pink" versus "chartreuse"?

Sometimes when I'm at the edge of sleep and a loud noise occurs, it may jolt me without immediately causing me to open my eyes. A pattern then appears in my vision that is invariably white on black (or seems to be) and usually looks like a splash. The title of this article led me to think there might be some discussion of that how a noise affects our visual/color receptors in the brain because there must be some overlapping wires in my head ...

The article forgets to answer the question in the title, but the answer is simple. Pink noise has more bass, and the color pink has more lower frequency light. Red noise has even more bass because red light is even lower frequency. Blue and violet noise have more treble, and those colors have more high frequency light.

There's a great talk by Adam Neely going into some interesting relations between sound and color: https://youtu.be/JiNKlhspdKg?t=1787 (timestamp where he starts talking about color, but the whole talk is interesting.)

Wait, static snow on old TV is cosmic microwave background radiation?

I've often heard that about 1% of radio static is contributed by background radiation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com