Writing Noise

Overview

Noise can mean either unwanted sound or unpitched sound. We are not interested in the former, unwanted sound, but are most definitely interested in the latter, unpitched sound.

Writing noise means writing music with unpitched sound.

Noise is an excellent place to start writing music:

1. Writing noise is easy to do. All that is needed is a noisy idea, which is a very easy thing to generate.
2. Noise in music is a feature of all music, live and recorded.
3. Noise music is a type of music worth writing just for its own sake.
4. Noise is used to write sound effects for film, TV, video, radio, computer games and ebooks.

There is another benefit to starting the guide with noise: the techniques for writing noise can also be used to write rhythm, melody and harmony. Writing noise is a way of illustrating procedures and methods that can be used to manipulate any sound. Writing noise provides a bag of tools that can be used to write any type of music.

This part of the guide looks first at the processes for generating noise with a computer, in particular, writing technical noise, additive synthesis and modulation synthesis. Then follows a comprehensive look at writing sound effects covering the techniques of dynamics, filtering, phasing, delay and pan.