“Put a crayfish in a silent aqaurium, add a turtle and it gets eaten, but add some random background noise to simulate the crackling and popping we can hear on underwater recordings made with hydrophones and the crayfish escapes. This is called stochastic resonance. Aural white noise or visual white noise can help both humans and crayfish to distinguish the event they want to see or hear. The randomness of white noise allows more possiblilites of a very faint sound wave finding another wave with which it can resonate and so be reinforced.”

—David Toop, from Haunted Weather: Music, Silence and Memory, 2004.