Richard A. Webb, Richard F. Voss, et al.
Physical Review Letters
The spectral density of fluctuations in the audio power of many musical selections and of English speech varies approximately as 1/f (f is the frequency) down to a frequency of 5X10-4Hz. This result implies that the audio-power fluctuations are correlated over all times in the same manner as “1/f noise'” in electronic components. The frequency fluctuations of music also have a 1/f spectral density at frequencies down to the inverse of the length of the piece of music. The frequency fluctuations of English speech have a quite different behavior, with a single characteristic time of about 0.1 s, the average length of a syllable. The observations on music suggest that 1 /f noise is a good choice for stochastic composition. Compositions in which the frequency and duration of each note were determined by 1/f noise sources sounded pleasing. Those generated by white-noise sources sounded too random, while those generated by l/fnoise sounded too correlated. © 1978 Acoustical Society of America