In
audio engineering,
electronics,
physics, and many other fields, the
color of a
noise signal (a signal produced by a
stochastic process) is generally understood to be some broad characteristic of its
power spectrum. Different colors of noise have significantly different properties: for example, as
audio signals they will sound different to
human ears, and as
images they will have a visibly different
texture. Therefore, each application typically requires noise of a specific color. This sense of 'color' for noise signals is similar to the concept of
timbre in
music (which is also called "tone color"); however the latter is almost always used for
sound, and may consider very detailed features of the
spectrum.