hi Carnie, the extreme curve creates video noise (electronic grain) because when you apply such an aggressive curve to any digital file (even sound file) what you are basically doing is amplifying it and that inevitably augments the noise, that's a fact.
I'm afraid you misunderstand. A dramatic correction curve does not necessarily amplify pre-existing noise in the source in the final print. It may/will increase contrast of noisy parts of an image in certain densities, depending on the correction curves, in the intermediate negative. But if the calibration (linearization) was done correctly, this will not translate into increased noisiness in the final print produced from that negative.
One potential problem with dramatic correction curves is the introduction of posterization artefacts. In practice, this is virtually entirely avoided by working in 16 bit space in the digital stage of the process. This is effective in combination with selecting printing parameters that deposit only as much density as necessary to print paper white in the target printing process. Posterization problems will/can emerge in parts of the tonal scale if you fail to do this and attempt to linearize negatives to an inkjet/digital printing process that creates excessively contrasty negatives. In this case, you would effectively end up using only a small part of the dynamic range of the negative and squash the entire tonal range of the final print in that color space. This will introduce artefacts, but as said, it's usually fairly easily avoided by selecting appropriate color channels and ink densities for your target printing process. Tools like QTR are great for this, but this is limited to Epson printers; for printers of other brands, you usually have to work with whatever functionality you can unlock in the printer driver dialogs. Even so, the problem I address here does not relate to increased noise that exists in the source file.
Another possible issue related to 'noise' in alt. process prints is the dither pattern of the printer that permeates into the final print. This effect can show up fairly strongly especially if the source file is already very noisy or grainy to begin with. In this scenario, the key problem is that interference effects between the printer dither pattern and the existing luminance noise in the image itself result in a relatively coarse-looking, gritty print. This is actually somewhat common with hybrid prints. Cutting down this effect relies mostly on optimizing the inkjet printer stage; again, selecting the most opportune ink channels and densities to be used is key, as well as more fundamentally selecting a printer that offers good performance to begin with (e.g. smaller droplet size/higher effective resolution). Again, this is unrelated to noise effects that are allegedly generated by the curve adjustment itself.
Finally, in some alt. processes, grainy/noisy prints are caused by the actual medium on which the print is made and process choices; e.g. brushed-on processes like cyanotype can end up somewhat grainy on some papers as a result of disturbance of the paper surface while applying the sensitizer. Some processes also can become 'grainy looking' as a result of chemistry choices; e.g. try increasing the amount of tartaric acid in a Van Dyke Brown sensitizer and see how the image ends up looking decidedly grainy. These inherent process parameters of course have nothing to do with adjustment curves.
The TL;DR of all this is that if you're trying to solve a problem with noisy prints, then start by thoroughly diagnosing the nature of the problem. I understand that at present, you have no particular problem to solve, but only a vague intuition of a potential source of a problem. That's not really a good position to start looking for solutions; simply put, without understanding what problem you're dealing with, there's not much you can do. So far, the problem that you do imply, does not seem to exist in the way you think it does, and I'd suggest not trying to solve it at all.
