Stoppages Vol. 3 continues this series’ investigation into the materiality of digital audio systems, focusing on how audio signals behave at the edge of digital systems’ perceptual and technical limits: the noise floor.

In digital audio, the noise floor refers to the system’s inherent background noise, generated by digital quantization errors and electronic circuitry. It is the physical limit of a digital audio system’s dynamic range. As a signal approaches this threshold, its amplitude becomes comparable to the least significant bit, the smallest discrete step in a digital system. At this scale, the signal merges with the noise floor, producing quantization artifacts, harmonic distortions, and emergent rhythmic patterns not present in the original sound.

This volume examines these effects by reducing the amplitude of selected material from Stoppages Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 until the signal approaches the scale of the least significant bit. The results were then amplified to a perceptible level, with additional audio restoration techniques used to bring forth emergent artifacts. The brackets in the track titles indicate the corresponding source material from previous volumes.