Animating canvas to look like tv noise

Question

I have a function named generateNoise() which creates a canvas element and paints random RGBA values to it; which, gives the appearance of noise.

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Answer 1

I re-wrote your code so each step is separate so you can re-use things without having to create and re-create each time, reduced in-loop calls and hopefully made it clear enough to be able to follow by reading it.

function generateNoise(opacity, h, w) {
    function makeCanvas(h, w) {
         var canvas = document.createElement('canvas');
         canvas.height = h;
         canvas.width = w;
         return canvas;
    }

    function randomise(data, opacity) { // see prev. revision for 8-bit
        var i, x;
        for (i = 0; i < data.length; ++i) {
            x = Math.floor(Math.random() * 0xffffff); // random RGB
            data[i] =  x | opacity; // set all of RGBA for pixel in one go
        }
    }

    function initialise(opacity, h, w) {
        var canvas = makeCanvas(h, w),
            context = canvas.getContext('2d'),
            image = context.createImageData(h, w),
            data = new Uint32Array(image.data.buffer);
        opacity = Math.floor(opacity * 0x255) << 24; // make bitwise OR-able
        return function () {
            randomise(data, opacity); // could be in-place for less overhead
            context.putImageData(image, 0, 0);
            // you may want to consider other ways of setting the canvas
            // as the background so you can take this out of the loop, too
            document.body.style.backgroundImage = "url(" + canvas.toDataURL("image/png") + ")";
        };
    }

    return initialise(opacity || 0.2, h || 55, w || 55);
}

Now you can create some interval or timeout loop which keeps re-invoking the generated function.

window.setInterval(
    generateNoise(.8, 200, 200),
    100
);

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Or with requestAnimationFrame as in Ken's answer

var noise = generateNoise(.8, 200, 200);

(function loop() {
    noise();
    requestAnimationFrame(loop);
})();

DEMO