In radio reception, noise is the superposition of white noise (also called "static") and other disturbing influences on the signal, caused either by thermal noise and other electronic noise from receiver input circuits or by interference from radiated electromagnetic noise picked up by the receiver's antenna. If no noise were picked up with radio signals, even weak transmissions could be received at virtually any distance by making a radio receiver that was sensitive enough. In practice, this doesn't work, and a point is reached where the only way to extend the range of a transmission is to increase the transmitter power.

Thermal noise can be made lower by cooling the circuits, but this is only usually worthwhile on radio telescopes. In other applications the limiting noise source depends on the frequency range in use. At low frequencies (longwave or mediumwave) and at high frequencies (shortwave), interference caused by lightning or by nearby electrical impulses in electrical switches, motors, vehicle ignition circuits, computers, and other man-made sources tends to swamp transmissions with thermal noise. These noises are often referred to as static. Atmospheric noise is radio noise caused by natural atmospheric processes, primarily lightning discharges in thunderstorms. At very high frequency and ultra high frequency these sources can still be important, but at a much lower level, such that thermal noise is usually the limiting factor. Cosmic background noise is experienced at frequencies above about 15 MHz when highly directional antennas are pointed toward the sun or to certain other regions of the sky such as the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.

In common use, the word noise means any unwanted sound.

In physics and analog electronics, noise is a mostly unwanted random addition to a signal; it is called noise as a generalisation of the acoustic noise ("static") heard when listening to a weak radio transmission with significant electrical noise. Signal noise is heard as acoustic noise if the signal is converted into sound (e.g., played through a loudspeaker); it manifests as "snow" on a television or video image. High noise levels can block, distort, change or interfere with the meaning of a message in human, animal and electronic communication.

In signal processing or computing it can be considered random unwanted data without meaning; that is, data that is not being used to transmit a signal, but is simply produced as an unwanted by-product of other activities. "Signal-to-noise ratio" is sometimes used to refer to the ratio of useful to irrelevant information in an exchange.

In biology, many different forms of cellular noise exist, where a measurement displays substantial variance around its mean: for example, transcriptional noise describes the variability in gene activity between cells in a population.

Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by electromagnetic waves with frequencies significantly below visible light, in the radio frequency range, from about 3 kHz to 300 GHz. These waves are called radio waves. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space.

Information, such as sound, is carried by systematically changing (modulating) some property of the radiated waves, such as their amplitude, frequency, phase, or pulse width. When radio waves strike an electrical conductor, the oscillating fields induce an alternating current in the conductor. The information in the waves can be extracted and transformed back into its original form.

The etymology of "radio" or "radiotelegraphy" reveals that it was called "wireless telegraphy," which was shortened to "wireless" in Britain. The prefix radio- in the sense of wireless transmission, was first recorded in the word radioconductor, a description provided by the French physicist Édouard Branly in 1897. It is based on the verb to radiate (in Latin "radius" means "spoke of a wheel, beam of light, ray").