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The entropy in white noise is maximal, if it's really white noise. One sample of white noise is indistinguishable from another; so if Spotify can identify whit
by denton-scratch 3y ago
The entropy in white noise is maximal, if it's really white noise.
One sample of white noise is indistinguishable from another; so if Spotify can identify white noise, then they can dedup, i.e. serve the same sample for every request for white-noise track.
What I find annoying is that people are wasting bandwidth uploading and downloading an undifferentiated hiss. White noise is trivial to generate locally, without consuming any bandwidth.
[Edit] Real white noise has the same energy at every frequency; the total energy in white noise is effectively infinite. Practical "white noise" is low-pass-filtered, which means it's no longer real white noise.
I wonder if these samples are really pink noise, and Spotify is talking nonsense?
- klyrs 3y agoA finite-length sample of the most perfect white noise will not attain maximum entropy. You mention a lowpass filter -- that's accomplished through the sampling frequency. But your proposal is an effective lowpass filter, as any frequency longer than the sample length will clipped to exactly the sample length -- which you'll be able to hear as a distinct rhythm if it's a sub-audible frequency, or a tone if it's shorter. Taken to the extreme, you're looping a single datum: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/random_number.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/random_number.png
- denton-scratch 3y agoWell, Spotify serves lossy compressed audio anyway. I don't know much about audio compression, but presumably it's first bandpass-filtered, and then filtered to remove psycho-acoutically unwanted audio components, and then compressed as a bitstream.