Why, when I go to an area that is blocked from radio signal, does my radio receive and/or output white noise or static instead of cutting out?
In: Technology
White noise is a random signal with equal intensity at every frequency…
It’s basically every sound at once.
So, for a human being who’s hearing range is 20Hz to 20kHz, when you hear white noise, you’re hearing all those frequencies at once at the same “volume”. Because of the way human hearing works, some frequencies are more intense than others at the same volume, 2kHz to 4kHz especially. So you hear a pretty annoying hiss sound that also seems to rumble.
A related type of noise is pink noise, which is similar to white noise but drops off at 3dB per octave, which more accurately models the “curve” of human hearing, and we actually find quite pleasant. Music is often mixed to a pink noise slope, and other things like rain also have a frequency response similar to pink noise.
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