Color Series | Jeff Forehan

Whitney Clay: Welcome to the West Valley College TEACH Center podcast.

Michelle Francis: TEACH stands for training educators advocating change.

Whitney Clay: I'm Whitney Clay, Instructional designer.

Michelle Francis: And I'm Michelle Francis, Professional Development Coordinator and Instructor in Child Studies.

Whitney Clay: At the TEACH Center, we support faculty as they cultivate excellence in teaching and learning and welcome their students with engaging pedagogies.

Michelle Francis: In this podcast, we discuss hot topics in teaching and learning. We interview educators about what they are doing in their fields, and we talk to learners about what inspires them.


Whitney Clay: Today, I want to welcome to the studio, Professor Jeff Forehan, Director of Commercial Music at West Valley College and welcome Jeff. Thanks for joining us.

Jeff Forehan: Well, I'm happy to be here. Thanks for asking me.

Whitney Clay: So I would like to ask you about pink noise, white noise and other colors of noise. What does that mean and how do you use it?

Jeff Forehan: Pink noise and white noise basically is a burst of noise that includes, like all the frequencies that our ears can hear, which is from 20 cycles per second to 20,000. They sound different, and I'm going to get out an oscillator and show you. OK, so here's an example of what white noise sounds like, which is has more high frequency content than pink noise. So that's white noise. Sounds like a waterfall. And then here's pink noise. And notice how it's got more low frequency content. So that's kind of a more robust waterfall.

Whitney Clay: Yeah.

Jeff Forehan: And this is the kind of stuff that you can put yourself to sleep with at night.

Whitney Clay: Are there other colors too?

Jeff Forehan: Not with regards to an oscillator that that generates sounds, which is what you were listening to. I mean, there's no such thing as black noise, purple noise that I know of. We musicians do use, you know, colorful terms to describe the quality of a sound or production, you know, everything from cool to hot. But obviously, you know, cool is blues and hot is orange and reds. But with regards to making things a little bit easier on your eyes while you're looking at a typical digital audio workstation, we are given the possibilities to color all of the tracks and markers and make the screen look a lot more pleasant to the eye by using colors. And that's a big part of our workflow. I insist that my students, when they set up a session to record something in the studio, they also make sure that they cover the tracks and the color, the markers, and it's just a great way to help organize things.

Whitney Clay: Is there a standard way of doing the colors, or does each person develop their own kind of style?

Jeff Forehan: That's a good question. That has not been standard, so it's really wild to see how one student will color a project versus another student. It's almost a kind of a peek into their psyche, if you know what I mean.

Whitney Clay: Yeah, that's kind of interesting. So with that generated noise, how would you use it building a track? What's it for?

Jeff Forehan: Well, listen. We were just using this and sound design recently in creating what we call an ambiance, like the sound of a room where there's very little sound. But if there's no sound, it doesn't seem realistic. But if you're creating the sound of a, you know, the control room in a spaceship, for instance, right? You can add other sounds of this, but if this this right here. Is that is the basis of it, it's a lot more realistic. Same with being outdoors. You know, we can use that sound and we put other things with it, obviously, to to make it. But I suggested this to my students and they all have kind of included it in their what we call ambiance sound design. Same with white noise. I mean, they're both used to design ambiance. Ambiance is of, you know, what a particular room might sound like or even walking on the street outside. But another thing is, you'll find this really interesting, when sound designers design what they call impulse reverbs, there are these algorithmically generated simulated sounds of rooms or sounds of concert halls, and they'll get a white noise generator in the room, and they'll they'll just excite the room with a burst of white noise. They'll record the sound of that room, all the reflections off of various surfaces and then go back and duplicate that with algorithms, and that gives them the sound of that room for somebody to use.

Whitney Clay: Oh, wow.

Jeff Forehan: Yeah, it's really, really interesting. It creates the sound of the reverb in a concert hall, but also in sound design. We use a couple, you know, sometimes we put white noise or pink noise at the beginning of a snare drum attack. Believe it or not, or the beginning of something that really needs more attack and it really helps it out. It's not enough that you can hear, you know, if you use just a couple of cycles of a white noise or pink noise because it gives you that. Yeah.

Whitney Clay: Can you tell me why? Why white and pink noise are called white and pink noise?

Jeff Forehan: You know, the reason they call it white noise is because it's analogous to white light, you know, white light containing all of the the visible light rays that we can see then that we can see just just like a white noise contains all the frequencies that we can hear. With regards to color, I mean, in music, you know the ratios, if you get down into the physics of sound and the physics of light audio is cycles per second and and light is, you know, wavelength as well in a different spectrum. There's lots of comparisons and lots of relationships there.

Jeff Forehan: That makes me wonder how your ear is taking in the sound differently or how different people's ears do.

Jeff Forehan: Yeah, that's interesting because we deal with that all the time in our in our mixing classes because everybody hears differently. Theoretically, what a healthy human ear should hear or is any sound that is from 20 cycles per second, which is really low all the way up to 20000 cycles per second, which is really high. But the human ear basically here is what's called the midrange sounds louder than we do the really high frequency sounds and the low frequency sound. So if you if our ears are bathed with white noise, that is all the frequencies that all the same energy, we're going to hear the midrange frequencies a little bit louder. I just think one of the cool phenomenons is that, you know, music is energy and light is energy and there. And you know, like those cones in your eyes are sensitive to a certain range of light frequencies, just like our ears are sensitive and respond to a certain range of audio frequencies. But it's all energy. It's all cycles. I find that relationship to be fascinating.

Whitney Clay: Thank you so much for letting me interview you and having this fascinating conversation. I appreciate it.

Jeff Forehan: I think this is a really interesting relationship between, you know, audio and and color.

Last Updated 5/20/22