Generate noise in your audio files

In this lesson we're going to make some noise.

We're going to use the Audition Noise Generator.

We're not going to make noise like clattering pans.

Instead we're going make noise like this. [noise] So why make noise like that?

Well there are a couple of reasons why.

One you can use noise like that to test audio gear.

You can test microphones and speakers and other audio gear.

You know the frequency response of the various noise signals here-- the various colors brown, grey, pink, and white, and so you can compare that to the output from these things and see how they're working.

But the more enjoyable thing to do is to use them to create sound effects.

The obvious sound effect is something like running water.

Like a great waterfall or something like that.

But you can apply affects to them and change the sounds pretty dramatically.

And a lot folks do use noise as the starting point for sound effects for games and other things like that.

We're going to make a new file now, so I'm going to right click here in the files panel, go new audio file, and I'm going to have it be a mono, 32-bit, 48,000 Hz, and we'll just call it noise test.

Okay?

I'm doing this so we have some place to put some noise.

Now let's track down the generate noise effect.

Go to effects, generate noise.

I'm going to talk about tones in a different lesson, so let's stick with noise here.

This is the generate noise dialog box.

There are some presets here, but I'm going to focus on the color.

There are 4 colors--brown, pink, white, and grey.

We'll go through each one here.

And notice that brown kind of leans heavy on the base.

Kind of rumbles on the base there.

Take a look at pink.

It's also base heavy, but not as heavy.

Some people think that pink is the best starting point to reproduce sounds of nature.

Take a look at white, it's flat across all frequencies.

It sounds like this.

It doesn't sound flat across all frequencies, it sounds like a high-pitched hiss.

That's because our ears are attuned to high frequencies.

We don't hear the base as much as we hear the treble.

Look at this compared to pink and brown.

Here's pink again, and there's brown.

Some people like to refer to pink, since it's between brown and white, as tan, but people do refer to it formally as pink.

And finally there's grey.

And grey is a cool thing because it is psychoacoustically equal to what you would expect white noise to sound like. [noise] You hear the base, you hear the treble, you hear the midtones.

So we perceive this as white noise, but in fact, it's not because it emphasizes the base and the treble so we can hear both ends there rather than the midtones only.

So that's grey.

There are some extra features accessible here in the style drop-down menu.

Right now mono is the only thing that's accessible because we're not working with a stereo file.

But I do make a spatial stereo file over here that we'll work with in just a few moments.

So I've got 5 files here that are all made up of those kinds of noise.

I've not done anything to them, I just made files from them-- 10 second files of each one.

We'll go in the order that they're listed inside the effects.

We'll start off with brown noise here.

That kind of rumbling one.

What's kind of cool is to apply an EQ effect to any one of these.

We'll apply it to this one though.

Go to effects, filter and EQ, and we'll go down to parametric equalizer.

We can do things like emphasizing the base and that kind of stuff, but I'd rather kind of mess with it a little bit.

So I've gone down here and got this old time radio preset there.

Let's just see what happens as I play this. [noise] So just imagine all the fun you can have when you set this thing up to make different kinds of sounds.

So that's what it's like to use an equalizer on one of these noise files.

You can use it on any one, I just chose to use it on the brown noise.

Here, I'll close this down.

Let's move on down the line now to the pink noise.

And again, I'm not picking them for any particular reason.

I just wanted to show you some examples of what you can do with these things.

With pink noise I want to change the gain on it a little bit and have it go up and down, making it sound like waves perhaps.

So to do that I go to effects, and I go to amplitude and compression, and go to the gain envelope.

And up where it says gain envelope here, I've already got a preset here.

Let's see what that sounds like. [noise] So there you go, that's one thing you can do with it.

You can make it sort of increase and decrease like waves crashing on the shore.

Obviously, those are very fast waves, but you could spread it out and simulate waves that way.

Let's go to white noise now.

With white noise I want to try to use the pitch benders.

Let's go to effects, time and pitch, and the pitch bender.

With the pitch bender when you change the pitch-- let's say if you increase the pitch--you increase the frequency, you also increase the speed.

So there's this perception of having it go up in pitch plus go faster.

So let's listen to this. [noise] So that's something you can do with the pitch bender in any one of those noises.

Let's move on now to grey noise.

I'm going to use the distortion affect here.

Go to effects, go to special, and go over to guitar suite.

Let's just listen to this for a while, and I'll punch through some of these presets. [noise] So you can see there are various presets inside the guitar suite that you can apply until you find something that works for you.

Finally I'm going to take a look at the spatial version.

This is a stereo version.

Where this is made is with 3 signals--left, right, and center.

And it sounds like audio is coming from everywhere.

If you've got a headset on right now, it will sound like you're surrounded by audio. [noise] You got these huge waves crashing on you or something like that.

But I'm going to mess with this one in a different way.

I'm go to switch over to the spectral frequency view here.

And I'm going to paint on it.

I got the paint tool there--the brush.

I'm just going to draw on this sort of wildly.

As I draw on it--just making these odd things here.

Then I'm doing to delete them.

So let's see what that sounds like.

Press the delete key, it takes that away.

If I click away, you'll see that we actually deleted that stuff.

Now I'm going to play this. [noise] I think you get a sense of some of the fun things you can do.

And finally I want to make a multitrack session here to show you one more thing.

I'm going to go Ctrl + Z to undo all that.

Click away from that, and so I'm going to right click on this, insert it in the multitrack--yep.

We'll take number one here, which is something I've used before.

So I'm going to save it over that.

I have this multitrack session, and I can pan this, and I can also change the volume on it.

So I'm going to go over here and change the volume by lifting this guy up a little ways, add keyframes, bring it down like that, bring it back up again.

Because I go back and forth here, it's going to be really abrupt.

I'm going to change it to the spline curve view here in just a second.

I'm going to right click on one of these keyframes like that and say spline curves.

And that will be a smoother change. [noise] So you can work on it here inside the multitrack session as well.

And you can also apply panning to it, so I've got this keyframe for panning there--I'll put another one on.

Go left and right.

And again, you can do spline curves here so it's not so dramatic.

From left to right--so I'll just put a couple more on here like that.

There we go.

And I'll right click on here and turn on spline curves for you too.

So these two guys are now working together. [noise] So you can see there's all kinds of possibilities in terms of what you can do with noise that you create using the generate noise effect.

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