  We study fluctuations in a vertically oscillated layer of grains below the
critical acceleration for the onset of ordered standing waves. As onset is
approached, transient disordered waves with a characteristic length scale
emerge and increase in power and coherence. The scaling behavior and the shift
in the onset of order agrees with the Swift-Hohenberg theory for convection in
fluids. However, the noise in the granular system is four orders of magnitude
larger than the thermal noise in a convecting fluid, making the effect of
granular noise observable even 20% below the onset of long range order.
