Latest version v1.24, 29 Aug 2024 by Mark Sheeky

Noise Station
Latest version v1.24, 29 Aug 2024

Screenshot of Noise Station Screenshot of Noise Station Screenshot of Noise Station Screenshot of Noise Station

About Noise Station
Noise Station was created in 2001 and designed like a music programming system, something like the music equivalent of a word processor. Originally, notes were typed in, and the music calculated without live playback. As processing power increased, live playback become more viable. In 2001 my PC had a 133mhz CPU, and I knew that the full virtual studio system would need 40 times more processing power than was available at the time!

Noise Station is a virtual studio. You can use it to create instruments and complete music tracks with no extra hardware or software. Developed for Windows 98 and Windows XP, the software was last updated in its original iteration to v1.20c on 6 Jul 2006. In August 2024, the program was updated to fit Windows 11 screens. The GUI code was overhauled, colour key restored, and windows sized for full screen contemporary computers. Noise Station v1.24 added a modulator graph, a new sample loader, 32-bit float export, and more.

Noise Station generates sound using the concept of engines. An engine is a component that creates or modifies sound in some way. You might have a sine wave generator engine, or a low pass filter, or a panning engine. Engines can be applied per-instrument, per-track or per-song.

Many of the parameters in the engines can be modulated, changed over time. Normal wav files are used as modulators, so the values can go up or down, following the cycle of the waveform selected. Many simple waveforms are supplied, sine waves etc. as well as various fades and sweeps.

Songs are built from events, normally simply note events that trigger an instrument. Special events can be used however to change the song speed, or the volume of the current instrument, track or song. Notes are played on the PC keyboard and are typed in, not recorded in real time. When the song is complete, a high quality version can be calculated and rendered as a wav file.

My first three albums; Synaesthesia (2001 version), The Incredible Journey, and the first version of The Spiral Staircase were created entirely using this software, as well as several tracks from The Flatspace Soundtrack (such as Catacombs).

Noise Station was briefly published as a boxed product in 2006 and subsequently published online. Noise Station v1.21 was released as freeware in 2019, and v1.24 was released for free under a Creative Commons BY-SA licence.

Noise Station by Mark Sheeky is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0