This question happens to be incredibly pertinent to my interests, and is the perfect time for me to launch into the subject. I’ll describe noise a little, and explain how I’m using noise signals in my recent projects. While the artistic process and absurdity are my most significant interests, I’m also deeply interested in the sciences and have had the fortunate coincidence of my academic life sharing a significant degree of overlap with my musical interests (perhaps only after the fact). My recent musical uses of noise don’t involve hearing the signal; more on that soon 
I began studying noise in December of 2010 in the UCM Cognitive Mechanics Research Laboratory (Cogmech). The research revolved around the avant garde of neural network algorithms, and was part of a collective effort toward developing hardware implementations of algorithms which are structurally similar to the architecture of the mammalian brain. My particular topic of research was 1/f (one-over-f) noise, more commonly known as “pink noise”.
Since then, I’ve been fascinated by noise signals of a few types and have been implementing them into my projects not for their sound, but for their behavior. My particular uses of noise have been as sources of randomness, the major emphasis being the nuances of each signal’s probability distribution. I’ll briefly explain white and pink.
White noise. “Random” signal with an equal power (db) distribution among all frequencies. This looks like a flat line when looking at its frequency spectrum.
white noise: spectral slope = 0.
Pink noise. “DA BEST” signal. approximately -3db drop per frequency octave. Low frequencies have higher power, high frequencies have lower power.
pink noise: spectral slope = -1.
I can only touch the surface of pink noise on this forum, but it is a very interesting phenomena in that it is observed in MANY distributions throughout nature, dynamic physical systems, and in numerous dimensions of human behavior (e.g. the minor timing deviations a human will make when trying to tap a button along with a steady metronome is 1/f. the variation in amplitude between two people talking is 1/f.) Read more if you’re at all curious.
I’m currently using pink noise as a source of “ordered randomness”, negative or positive values hover around a mean value of zero to set timing-delays applied to percussion sample triggering. I scale the range to an almost sub-audible range. Pink noise does for pseudo-human what white noise did for pseudo-random.
enjoy some noise, audible or not!
