Example: Synthesis of 1/F Noise (Pink Noise)

Pink noise^6.10 or ``1/f noise'' is an interesting case because it occurs often in nature [273],^6.11is often preferred by composers of computer music, and there is no exact (rational, finite-order) filter which can produce it from white noise. This is because the ideal amplitude response of the filter must be proportional to the irrational function , where denotes frequency in Hz. However, it is easy enough to generate pink noise to any desired degree of approximation, including perceptually exact.

The following Matlab/Octave code generates pretty good pink noise:

Nx = 2^16;  % number of samples to synthesize
B = [0.049922035 -0.095993537 0.050612699 -0.004408786];
A = [1 -2.494956002   2.017265875  -0.522189400];
nT60 = round(log(1000)/(1-max(abs(roots(A))))); % T60 est.
v = randn(1,Nx+nT60); % Gaussian white noise: N(0,1)
x = filter(B,A,v);    % Apply 1/F roll-off to PSD
x = x(nT60+1:end);    % Skip transient response

In the next section, we will analyze the noise produced by the above matlab and verify that its power spectrum rolls off at approximately 3 dB per octave.

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About the Author: Julius Orion Smith III
Julius Smith's background is in electrical engineering (BS Rice 1975, PhD Stanford 1983). He is presently Professor of Music and Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Electrical Engineering at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), teaching courses and pursuing research related to signal processing applied to music and audio systems. See http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/ for details.