I should let Rachel weigh in on this, since this is really her code.  But I suspect the functionality you suggested is (a) not something that needs to be done now -- better to wait until there is a specific use case for it that might inform how it should be designed, and (b) not really appropriate for the `noise_pad` parameter, since there wouldn't be any random number generator action with it, so it's not exactly "noise" in the sense that we usually use it here.