[music-dsp] Article: antialiased sine waveform syncing

[robert bristow-johnson]

On Jun 8, 2009, at 8:48 AM, george bezerianos wrote:

>
> http://s1gnals.blogspot.com/2008/12/bloo_6897.html
>
...

On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 2:12 PM, Vadim Zavalishin wrote:

>>
>> http://www.native-instruments.de/index.php?id=dsparticles
>>
>> Comments welcome.
>>

hi Vadim and George.

i took a look at both the bloo.pfd and the SineSyncRC.pdf (i could  
not extract what i was looking for in the SineSync.pdf).

now in bloo, George is creating a blit, as best as i can tell, and i  
am not sure if you're getting a sinusoid out of it, but if you are,  
is your BLIT going through some resonant filter or something?  i  
don't see where the sin(wt) is coming out of it.

in SineSyncRC, Vadim is using a quite long polynomial of |x| to  
approximate a sine function over a period (and i presume he's driving  
that with a sawtooth function coming out of a phase-accumulator that  
defines the phase of the waveform).

are my understandings reasonably correct?

about Vadim's method, that's fine and good, but i think you're  
throwing *much* more polynomial at it to get an acceptable  
synthesized sine wave.  the sine function is fully analytic (not the  
Hilbert transform meaning of "analytic").  it is continuous and has  
continuous derivatives, no matter how deep you go.  that lends itself  
to very good polynomial approximation, *particularly* for the 1/2  
cycle before the sin() bends around back (and +/- pi/2).

i would suggest aiming to approximate

     sin( pi/2 * x )    for    -1 <= x <= +1

sin(x) is a completely odd-symmetry, so any decent polynomial  
approximation would be odd-symmetry (and odd-order).  if you factor  
out the x, and express as

     sin( pi/2 * x ) =  x * p(x^2)

you are left with a simple polynomial that is made into an even- 
symmetry polynomial when x^2 is the argument.


     p(x^2) = sin(pi/2*x)/(pi/2*x) * pi/2 = pi/2 * sinc(x/2)     -1  
<= x <= +1

or

     p(x) = pi/2 * sinc( sqrt(x)/2 )      for  0 <= x <= +1


unlike George, i (and nearly all my EE textbooks) define the sinc(x)  
function to have the pi in it:

     sinc(x) = sin(pi*x)/(pi*x)

that is the polynomial that you want coefficients for (after  
determining the order necessary).  you might be surprized to see how  
good of a fit you get for merely a 2nd or 3rd-order approximation to  
the sinc(sqrt(x)/2) function.  don't use Taylor series, but try to be  
more optimal in getting the coefficients.  least-squares would be  
good, in this case, but the Remes Exchange algorithm would work also.

oh, the other thing is that you need to turn your sawtooth phase  
function into a triangle since the sin(x) function is being fit for  
only 1/2 period.  if your saw goes from -1 to +1, then

     tri(x) = 2*|saw(x)| - 1

that absolute value operation is the only one you'll need.   
everything else is just plug-and-chug into the polynomial.


--

r b-j                  rbj at audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."