What's White About White Noise?

Why is white noise white? What would orange or purple noise sound like? According to novelist Janet Fitch, “You can’t describe a color without synesthesia” (Fitch). To a large degree, the same holds true for sound. We can say a sound is “loud” or “high-pitched,” defining its amplitude or frequency, respectively. But to characterize its timbre, its unique feel, we need help from other sensory modalities. The ways sensations align in everyday speech reveal cultural beliefs but also relationships among human senses.

Synesthesia is the mental ability to experience one sensory modality in terms of another. In a synesthete, the relationship between the inducer (a perception elicited by an external stimulus) and the concurrent (a perception in another modality evoked by the inducer) is conscious, systematic, idiosyncratic, involuntary, and uncontrollable (Spence & Deroy 174-75). A synesthete might always see the letter “B” as blue, for instance, not because of a vague intuition that it should be blue but because it invariably looks blue to her.

Neurologist V. S. Ramachandran and his colleagues have proposed a “sensory cross-activation hypothesis” to explain synesthesia, arguing that synesthetes retain connections among sensory networks that in most people are “pruned” early in life (Ramachandran et al. 8). Synesthesia is more common than once thought, occurring in up to one in forty people (Ramachandran et al. 5). Whether synesthesia represents a unique ability or the end of a spectrum along which we all lie remains controversial (Lacey et al. 2716).

Metaphorically describing one sensation in terms of another is a widespread human trait. In the 19th century, French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote of “correspondences” among sensory modalities (Baudelaire 23). Today, neuroscientists and psychologists are experimentally exploring his intuition about corresponding sensations. While fewer than 2.5% of us are synesthetes, most of us perceive cross-modal correspondences, “near-universally experienced associations between seemingly unrelated sensory features” (Lacey et al. 2716). So far, studies of cross-modal correspondences have concentrated on the auditory and visual systems. Not only have they indicated associations between sounds and shapes; they also point toward a common tendency to associate high pitch with high elevation and small size (Lacey et al. 2716).

In a recent behavioral study, synesthetes showed “tighter” cross-modal correspondences between sound and shape than non-synesthetes did, even when the associations didn’t involve the sensory domains that the synesthetes automatically connected. They scored the same as non-synesthetes, however, in associating pitch with elevation and size (Lacey et al. 2720). More studies will be needed to determine whether synesthesia is a unique capacity or a more robust form of sensory interconnections that many brains make.

While synesthesia is inborn, cross-modal correspondences may be learned, at least in part. It makes sense that many cultures would associate high voices with small bodies—a link that often but not always holds true. Other associations, such as those involving colors, can vary greatly with culture. In East Asia, white is a color of mourning; in the U. S., black signals the sharing of grief.

Metaphorically, whiteness delivers a powerful impact and can have a life-or-death, existential quality. For good reason, some people wear white to mourn the loss of people they love. Consider the “Snow” chapter in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain or the “Whiteness of the Whale” chapter in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. “It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me,” Ishmael tells his readers (Melville 151). In these extraordinary tales of life-and-death struggles, the perceived absence of color suggests what the absence of life might mean.

Conceiving of soft, diffuse sound as white has probably grown from intertwined cultural and biological roots. Technically, “white noise” denotes a sound equally intense at all the frequencies it includes (Oxford English Dictionary). Digital technology and marketing have spread the term widely, but on a gut level, “white noise” also feels apt. To anyone who has experienced snow, it may bring to mind a winter forest’s hush.

Winter Scene at Shipka Pass, Bulgaria, Jan. 8, 2006

Source: Psy guy, Snow Scene at Shipka Pass, Wikimedia Commons

Don Delillo’s 1985 novel, White Noise, explores the cultural and technological aspects of this synesthetic metaphor. Delillo’s main characters, Jack Gladney and his wife, Babette, are raising a blended family in a small college town where Jack teaches Hitler Studies. Black and white images abound when a “black billowing cloud” from a chemical spill threatens everyone in town and Jack drives through snowy woods to save his family (Delillo 115). The white noise of their lives refers to the nonstop flow of dubious information from their television but also the terrifying prospect of death.

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“‘What if death is nothing but sound?’ [Babette asks Jack.]

‘Electrical noise.’

‘You hear it forever. Sound all around. How awful.’

‘Uniform, white.’

‘Sometimes it sweeps over me,’ she said. ‘Sometimes it insinuates itself into my mind, little by little. I try to talk to it. Not now, Death’” (Delillo 198-99).

The whiteness of noise suggests a lack and an excess: an excess of information, and a looming lack of life. Delillo’s novel follows Jack’s and Babette’s increasingly bizarre attempts to combat their fear of death.

In this time of hyper-awareness of human differences, it pays to think about how we describe sensory experiences. Laboratory experiments indicate common, cross-cultural trends in the ways people perceive “correspondences” among senses, such as sound and shape or sound and size. Cultures also influence associations with sensations, and the meaning of “white noise” continues to evolve in a swirl of technical language, bodily experiences, and cultural beliefs. Delillo, who worked as a marketer, knew all too well how synesthetic metaphors convey and shape human experiences. Only some of us are synesthetes, but creatively connecting senses to describe our feelings may help us understand each other’s lives.