We made pseudo random values from a sine wave, then from it we construct noise. We went from the absolute chaos to smooth random variations we can control.
With it we were able to suggest more organic visual gestures. But we still far away from the “real” thing. If we look to satelites images, coherent structers emerge from mountans formation, looking closely to the surface of a leave we will see a clear an inner pattern. This surfaces speaks about the forces involve on their creation. On the tension of the laws applied apply to them together with the forces of their surrandings.
The next step in our quest on learning how to mimic nature will be to learn about iterations. More precisely iterations on time and iterations on space.
Noise tends to means different things for different people. Musicians will think it in disturbing sounds, communicators as interference and astrophysics as cosmic microwave background. In fact most of this concept have one things in common that bring as back to the begining of random. Waves and their properties. Audio or electromagnetical waves, fluctuation overtime of a signal. That change happens in amplitud and frequency. The ecuation for it looks like this:
By doing the last to excersize you have manage to "modulate" a sine wave, and you just create AM (amplitud modulated) and FM (frequency modulated) waves. Congratulations!
Another interesting property of waves is their ability to add up. Add the following lines to the previus example and pay atention how the frequencies and amplitudes change conform we add different waves.
In music, each note is asociated with specific a frequency. This frequencies seams to respond to a pattern where it self in what we call scale.
By adding different iterations of noise (*octaves*), where in each one increment the frequencies (*Lacunarity*) and decreasing amplitude (*gain*) of the **noise** we can obtain a bigger level of granularity on the noise. This technique is call Fractal Brownian Motion (*fBM*) and in it simplest form looks like the following code
This techniques is use commonly to construct procedural landscapes. The self similarity of the fBm is perfect for mountains, together with a close cassing known as turbulence. Esentially a fBm but constructed from the absolute value of a signed noise.