Gray noise is a type of noise that sounds the same to the human ear at all frequencies. It is important in the study of psychoacoustics, which evaluates how the human brain processes sound and is of interest to those studying hearing loss. Other types of noise include white, pink, brown, purple, blue, orange, black, and green noise.
Gray noise is one of the many colors of noise. There’s also white noise, pink noise, brown noise (sometimes called red noise), purple noise (or purple noise), blue noise, orange noise, black noise, green noise, and even more. Noise is an electrical signal that produces an acoustic sound. Colors are assigned to noise and are matched based, roughly, on correlations between the frequency of the sound wave and the frequency of the color’s light wave.
Gray noise, therefore, has a sound frequency which, if translated into a light frequency, would roughly be the color gray. Gray noise is random sound that is distinguishable from other types of sound because it sounds the same to the human ear at all frequencies.
Perhaps the most commonly discussed noise color is white noise. Also a random noise, white noise is distinguishable not only by its color, but because it’s actually the same at all frequencies. That is, it has the same energy levels at all frequency levels. Not gray noise, but it sounds like this to the human ear.
The reason gray noise sounds the same to the human ear regardless of frequency is due to something called a psychoacoustic equal-volume curve. Also called a psychoacoustic equal-volume curve or a Fletcher-Munson curve, this quality within gray noise takes into account the individual biases of the human ear, measuring the loudness, level and intensity of sound. The result is a sound that appears to sound the same at all frequencies.
Because sound perception can vary from listener to listener, gray noise is an important phenomenon in the study of psychoacoustics, the study of the subjectivity of the human ear with respect to different perceptions of sounds. Psychoacoustics evaluates how the human brain is able to hear a sound, how sound is transmitted to the brain, and how the listener processes this information to determine a sound. It then takes this information and compares how sound is perceived from ear to ear by different listeners. Consequently, psychoacoustics, and therefore gray noise, is of particular interest to those studying the potential for hearing loss, including that of workers in noisy industrial environments.
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