How to measure signal to noise ratio (SNR)

The world feels loud these days, too damn loud for me!  It is the sorta loud where everything starts blending together.  The anger.  The misinformation.  The constant outrage cycles.  The hot takes.  The factions all yelling at this, that, and the other things, each dead certain they’re right.  After a sustained bombardment of noise, a sort of positive feedback loop kicks in.  For the non techies, that is like when you yell into a bad microphone and it just keeps winding itself up, shriller and the louder the shrill, the louder it makes itself.  The thing about the noise is that if you are exposed to it long enough you can start forgetting what the actual signal sounds like, you become acclimated to the noise.  When we hit that point, we can easily forget that truth has tone, dignity has tone, humanity has tone and right now those tones are being drowned out by all this damn noise.

Working in technology for my entire adult life, especially my experience with high power transmitters, situates me to understand and think about signal to noise ratios more than most folks.  Not in some abstract way, in a way that only 40 years of experience with signal to noise can give a person.  I see everyone contributing to the feedback loop, in ways we may not even recognize.  Some of it big, like what we share with others, how fast we react, whether we read past the headline, whether we treat people like avatars or people from the protection of distance and the buffer of our devices. 

Then there is the small consistent actions we take, noticing when a coworker is off and handing them a pack of lifesavers or texting that friend back right away vs leaving it unread, or even taking a breath before we ad one more opinion or hot take to the already burning pile.  Being a helper is signal amplification work, not noise amplification work.  The small stuff may seem small but it is what changes the room.  Choose to be steady when everything around you is trying wind you up.  I got this tattoo to be my constant reminder to pause,  think and check in with my values, which I hold in my heart, and then determine if I am feeding the signal or the noise. 

 
The more I think about this the more it actually feels like we are living in world with bad filters.  When stray harmonics are introduced into things they contribute to the feedback loop as noise and we install filters specifically to remove those frequencies, for example if you are old enough to remember the 60hz hum in your fancy wood sided Kenwood receiver when the caps started dying, you understand what I mean.  When filters go bad, or drift off frequency, the downstream signal chain gets fuzzy or distorted. 

The signal is still there but what comes out sounds like hot garbage.  In today’s world the filters are no longer mechanical and inert.  Todays filters are the algorithmic automatons running our feeds, they are far from inert and designed to keep us scrolling.    This is evident when half baked headlines of outrage of one sort or the other out runs the truth of things and it seems the collective we have the attention span of a Bolivian fruit fly, and the algorithms know it.   We can see how easily distortion becomes our reality, the algorithmic engagement engines work hard at that.

Some days it feels like we are compressing our humanity just to fit into the feed.  In audio, and video when you compress too aggressively it strips out the warmth, the nuance and all the things that makes audio feel alive and full and the things that make video so dynamic.  The compression on the old analog TV is a good example, that looked washed out and lifeless.  I feel like our habits now drive us to do that to each other.  We flatten folks to their worst moment, their loudest mistake and pretend that actually describes the original signal.  The world and those who live in it are not binary, we are magnificently complex and quirky individuals who all have something to add to the greater good, foibles, skeletons and all.  Humans are not MP3 files, we are not meant to be reduced until all the good frequencies get lost in the noise.

And then there is interference.  Every engineer has dealt with that as some point, some spurious source bleeding into the wires, some device screaming on the same frequency or that blasted 5^th harmonic or some trash noise signal bouncing around inside the chassis.  We got the same damn thing happening in almost every aspect of our lives.   Everyone broadcasting all the time, the damn ground is floating and the power supply hash is  wreaking havoc.  Half the time we are reacting to cross talk from folks we don’t know, will never meet in places we will not go, and this is on issues that both of us barely understand in the first place.  No wonder clarity feels so scarce.  We need a faraday cage to block out the interference.  

While this almost sounds like me waxing philosophical, I want to be clear, I am no Saint in this.  I am not walking the noble eight fold path with the discipline of a monk.  I’m stumbling along like a drunken sailor, who just won’t stop trying.  I very much contribute to the noise, I recognize this posting is part of that noise.  Sometimes I react to quickly, sometimes I let my frustration lead instead of my better self.  But the older I get, the more I realize my noise footprint matters, no more cranking it up to 11.  All of us contribute, we have obligation to each other to file the STA, that is Smitty speak getting permission to crank that transmitter down to low power.  Reducing the power does not mean shutting it down. Cranking it down is a choice, and intentional act to ensure our better selves lead, in all situations.  Asking ourselves is what Im about to feed into my transmitter adding signal clarity or am I injecting noise.  That little pause, that check in, that is signal work too.

Over my life I have noticed a constant, every helper I’ve ever known or seen is basically a walking signal amplifier.  It’s a special amplifier, it allows to spin off more positive and good into the universe than we do negative and bad.  They always seem to show up calm when things get chaotic.  They offer presence instead of gas for the fire.  They tune in the quiet stuff that everyone else misses.  They say the hard truth in a way that folks can actually hear it.  Helpers don’t crank up the volume or the power, they improve the fidelity.  They help everyone in the room hear the parts that matter. 

Look Y’all, at the end of the day measuring signal to noise is simple, we measure what comes through clean vs what just adds static. You look at what you’re putting out into the universe and you ask yourself, does this make the signal clearer or just louder.  If its noise, crank that shit down.  If its signal, power it up because truth, dignity and humanity still cut through when we the stop feeding the freaking feedback loop.  If ya wanna remember what the signal sounds like, find a helper or better yet, be one.

Then again, at the end of the day I am not trying to win the internet.  I am just trying to stay human in a world that has gotten really loud.  Measuring SNR is not a fancy thing, it’s a gut check, is  what I am spooling into the universe going to help someone hear the truth, or is it just more static?   So here is what I am choosing.  I am choosing the pause.  I am choosing the small acts of kindness.  I am choosing to be the kind of person who improves the fidelity in the room instead of creating a feedback loop that does nothing but screech at us.  I am going to keep checking that tattoo like its my own SNR meter, and keep trying to make the music cleaner instead of louder.  It’s a reminder, pause, check the meter, and don’t feed the noise.  Maybe, just maybe the most radical thing we can do is to be steady in the turbulence.  Send the strongest signal you can with the simple message, they are not alone and that you are here for them.