Pitch Noise is not a noise oscillator. It doesn’t add a noise signal into the sound. Instead, it randomly varies the frequency of each harmonic.
Every harmonic has an original frequency, and Pitch Noise decides how far that frequency is allowed to wander.
The more you turn up Pitch Noise, the wider that window gets, spreading a single harmonic across the spectrum.
On the spectrogram you can watch the tidy sine waves smear out until it’s all over the place.
Gaussian is life
The randomness of Pitch Noise isn’t flat like white noise. It hovers around the harmonic’s true frequency, following a Gaussian (normal) distribution.
This means most of the wandering stays close to “home,” which helps things sound organic rather than harsh.
As with the rest of the page, you can use the Odd/Even/Octave Selector and the Harmonic XY controls to choose which harmonics get noise.
Sound Designer’s Tip: keep the fundamentals clean and pile the noise onto the higher partials. You’ll get coherent-but-noisy tones: a clear pitch with a hazy, unstable top end.
Fuzz and Swarm
Pitch Noise has two modes that change how it moves between those random frequencies.
Fuzz
Fuzz is the default. Harmonics constantly moves between random frequencies in the “window.”
Swarm
Swarm moves between frequencies at the Pitch Rate you’ve set rather than as fast as possible.
Each harmonic jumps to a new frequency on every tick of that rate.
Raise Pitch Noise and the window each harmonic can leap around in gets huge. When every harmonic has different rates and amount of noise, things get pretty interesting.
Turn the rate up and you get a different quality of noise altogether: computery, strange, alien-sounding.
Swarm was actually the first version I built. Fuzz came later and became the default, but I left Swarm in because it’s quite unique.
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