Electrical devices receive and emit electromagnetic noise in the electrical grid.

 

The so-called background noise that can sometimes be heard from speakers at low volume, is the evident part or the tip of the iceberg of a deterioration process that the electrical signals are experiencing.

In actual fact the signal coming from the guitar or bass has already been intensely distorted by its fundamental physical elements before reaching the amplifier.

 

To grasp this phenomenon we need to turn to the processes of electrical conduction which govern the transmission of sound signals:

the electrons that bring the first portion of “sound” are those close to the external surface of the cable. These come through the air before the others, allowing the device to play, albeit at very low volume, even before it has been connected,  since mere proximity is sufficient.

What happens inside the solid cable is anything but comforting: here the fastest electrons are those located towards the cable surface.

 

Imagine that sound waves are like water waves: instead of moving in one direction, in a neat sinusoidal way, the varying speeds of the electrons result in waves of different sizes, intensity and shape.

 

What we now see is a rough sea where magnetic “storms” and vibrational “winds”, mix the surface electrons at want, and produce further distortions of time, shape and width, as well as completely new waves.

 

Since our brain is designed to organize and rearrange perceptual phenomenon—what we hear is the forced reconstruction of a set of waves that have similar physical parameters in common.

Only when some waves are completely different do we classify them as background noise or simply as distortion.

 

But, what happens if we give consistency back to the original signal and wipe out the magnetic and vibrational storms?