The Pitch-Noise-Continuum | turning white noise into notes

I recently started to play around with Pure Data. After some time I came up with a synth patch that uses filtered noise as it’s sound source. Since Ableton Live has been the center of my workflow I finally decided to switch to Max for Live.

The idea was to take white noise and run it through a bandpass filter (see the pictures). White noise has equal intensity throughout the whole frequency spectrum – so it basically contains all frequencies! If you make the filter steep enough you will at some point, at least theoretically, end up with a sine wave – since you cut away all the frequencies above and below it.

Watch the video to learn more about noise, aliens and pudding! You can download the Max for Live Instrument here.

Illustrations by pigs and pencils

Software:
Pure Data
Ableton Live
Max for Live

You can try this yourself in any DAW. All you need is a synth plugin that can output white noise (I used Ableton Analog) and an EQ (I used FabFilter Q3).

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