Pink noise, white noise, sine waves, square waves, A-weighting, C-weighting… anyone with an interest in sound has come across these terms, but what do they actually mean?
Tuesday, September 01, 2020
Clearing The Air: Defining A Host Of Commonly Used Audio Terms
Pink noise, white noise, sine waves, square waves, A-weighting, C-weighting… anyone with an interest in sound has come across these terms, but what do they actually mean?
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4 comments:
I’ve been excited to learn how to use a sound board ever since I was told by a sound techie, as I was working as SM, that there where sound waves all around us and she was just manipulating them with her sound board. This was a very concise and helpful article for someone who doesn’t know much of the science behind sound waves. The writer defined basic terms like octave, which I use all the time but never knew what it really meant!
I really enjoy reading articles about sound, especially the engineering behind it, because it is such an incredibly complex field to capture using math and science. I appreciate that the author points out at the end of the article: "The bottom line: do we need to know most of this to mix a show? Probably not", because it just goes to show that we still rely on the human side of technical theatre. That is not to say that it isn't important to understand these terms, quite the opposite. Understanding what pink and white noise is, and how to use it, is vital to setting up a room in the traditional sense. Understanding what a decibel is is neat, and while you won't be doing the math to convert that into pressure when mixing a musical, it does explain that double the decibels is NOT the same as twice as loud. All of this, though, helps form our understanding of why sound behaves the way it does, and gives us tools and vocabulary to use in the venue at the console.
This article seems like a solid collection of basic terms in audio mixing. As someone with no experience in this area beyond being able to recognize a sound board, it is certainly a welcome bit of information! I was particularly interested in the difference between white and pink noise: I did not know that our hearing has different responses at different frequencies, though I suppose that makes sense. As such, it logically follows that testing noise should be weighted to emulate our hearing, rather than being even at all frequencies. It also makes sense that our ability to measure sound and our response to it has grown and evolved over time, leading to the difference between A-, C-, and Z- weighting measurements. The foray into the various units of measure and wave shapes was also really interesting. I had never heard of the 'phon' before! It seems useful to be able to set a standard reference for intensity, even though one person's loud is another person's medium. Overall, I think this was a pretty solid article!
As someone who stopped working with audio technology when high school ended, I never really got into using a lot of the terms mentioned in the article, but I still have a spark of interest whenever I see things about sound. I think this article did a pretty good job explaining the few bits of audio terminology in an basic way. It was pretty cool learning about the differences between pink and white noise. I’d known they were some kind of sound but I didn’t know about the frequency differences they had! I’ve also seen things like ‘blue noise’ or ‘green noise’ etc. thrown around in various places and I wonder if those have actual frequency differences and purposes, or if they’re just mimicking white noise in a difference color name. I also like how they talk about the way human hearing works since I’ve never really learned that much about it in the past. I kinda wish the article was a little longer and explained more things!
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