Movies are much pinker today than in the past — not in tint, but in the way the cuts resemble pink noise:
According to the new report, the basic shot structure of the movies, the way film segments of different lengths are bundled together from scene to scene, act to act, has evolved over the years to resemble a rough but recognizably wave-like pattern called 1/f, or one over frequency — or the more Hollywood-friendly metaphor, pink noise. Pink noise is a characteristic signal profile seated somewhere between random and rigid, and for utterly mysterious reasons, our world is ablush with it. Start with a picture of Penélope Cruz, say, or a flamingo on a lawn, and decompose the picture into a collection of sine waves of various humps, dives and frequencies. However distinctive the original images, if you look at the distribution of their underlying frequencies, said Jeremy M. Wolfe, a vision researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, “they turn out to have a one over f characteristic to them.”So, too, for many features of our natural and artifactual surroundings. Track the pulsings of a quasar, the beatings of a heart, the flow of the tides, the bunchings and thinnings of traffic, or the gyrations of the stock market, and the data points will graph out as pink noise. Much recent evidence from reaction-time experiments suggests that we think, focus and refocus our minds, all at the speed of pink. If you’re sitting at a task, Dr. Cutting said, “sometimes you’re good at it, sometimes your mind wanders, sometimes you’re fast, sometimes you’re slow, and the oscillating patterns that occur are generally one over f.”
White noise is uncorrelated data — like static. Brown noise is a random walk — each step is based on the one before. Pink noise is correlated enough to create a pattern, but chaotic enough to be interesting — like your heart rate.