Category: what i learned

This week’s weird FFT

This week, I was testing a device that required that I look WAY down into the floor caused by the noise+distortion artefacts in the presence of a signal.

One trick to do this is to play a sinusoidal wave through the system and do an FFT of the output. However, as I described in this posting a long time ago, there is an interaction between the frequency you choose and the behaviour of an FFT on a digital signal (yes… I know it’s really a DFT – but let’s not be pedantic…)

For example, if I do a 65536-point FFT on a 997 Hz sine tone in a 48 kHz sampling rate (with all the floating point precision I have available…) I get a magnitude response that looks like this:

Figure 1. The magnitude response of a 997 Hz sine tone, but is it really?

Obviously, this is NOT the magnitude response of a sinusoidal wave. The “skirts” on either side of 997 Hz are artefacts caused by the fact that I’m using a rectangular window, and the sine wave’s last sample does not line up perfectly with its first when the FFT “wraps” it around to meet itself (read this leading up to Figure 10 for an explanation). That sharp discontinuity causes the extra energy in the other frequency bins as shown above.

If, however, I find out the frequency of the closest FFT bin, and make my sine wave THAT frequency instead, THEN I do an FFT and look at the magnitude response, it looks like Figure 2.

Figure 2. The magnitude response of a 996.8261718750000 Hz sine tone.

Notice that this is not a 997 Hz tone, but a 996.8261718750000 Hz tone instead.

Now the “noise floor” that you see there is the error in my sine wave caused by the precision of my calculator (Matlab). -300 dB is VERY low, and gives me plenty of room to see the errors in the thing that I might be testing (assuming that I can actually get that signal out to my Device Under Test or “DUT” and back in again from it).

Let’s say I were to represent the same sine wave using a 24-bit LPCM signal that has been correctly dithered with TPDF dither, and THEN I do the FFT and calculate the magnitude response. That would look like Figure 3.

Figure 3. The magnitude response of a 996.996.8261718750000 Hz sine tone that has been dithered and quantised with 24 bit precision.

Now, the energy at all the frequencies other than 996.8-ish Hz is the energy in the noise floor generated by the dither. (If you’re wondering why it’s almost 200 dB down, and not 141 dB down (6*24-3), it’s because the total energy in all those FFT bins add up to a noise floor that’s 141 dB below the sine tone.)

Okay. All of those plots show things that I’ve seen before – and are things that I would expect to see when measuring a device.

But then, this week, I did a measurement that produced the magnitude response shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. A 996.996.8261718750000 Hz sine tone and something else…

This is NOT something I’ve seen before, so it raised one of my two eyebrows. In retrospect, I should have known what would cause this, but at the time, I was very confused. It’s not a noise floor because it’s too flat. It’s not distortion because it doesn’t have harmonics. So what is it?

The answer is actually really simple.

  • The sine tone is visible as the spike in the magnitude plot, just like in all the others.
  • The flat horizontal line is the result of a single-sample click that happened sometime in the 65536 samples that I used to do the FFT.

The sum (or mix) of the sine + click results in the magnitude response plot you see above. If you’re looking at the signal itself, it just means that one of the 65536 samples has an error, and isn’t sitting on the sine curve. I’ve shown an example of this in Figure 5.

Figure 5. The sample with the error is shown in red. All other 65535 samples are behaving as they should

The greater the error of that one sample value, the higher the floor in Figure 4.

Of course, for these plots, I simulated everything in Matlab. However, the actual result was even more interesting / confusing, since the DUT didn’t have a flat magnitude response. So, instead of a nice, horizontal line like the one I’ve shown in Figure 4, I could see something like the response of the system as well, but I’ll stay away from the details of that to keep things simple here.

n Mod -m: Max vs. Matlab

Today I was working on a little acoustics simulation patcher in Cycling 74’s Max, and part of the code required the use of a modulo function. No problem, right?

Problem. I originally wrote the code in Matlab, and I was porting it to Max; and the numbers just weren’t working properly. After getting rid of my own home-made bugs, it still wasn’t working…

Turns out that there seems to be a disagreement in the code community about how to do the modulo of a negative number.

The best indication of the problem I was facing is found on this page, where you can see that different languages come up with different answers for -13 mod 3 and 13 mod -3. The problem is that neither Max nor Matlab are in the list. So: here are the results of those two, to add to the list.

Matlab’s results
Max’s results, including using the gen object.

The results are:

Language13 mod 3-13 mod 313 mod -3-13 mod -13
Matlab12-2-1
Max1-11-1

This means that Matlab behaves like Python, using the formula

mod(a, n) = a – n * floor(a / n)

whereas Max behaves like C and Java.

So, if you, like me, move back and forth between Matlab and Max, beware!

what i learned last week

1. hitler thought that berlin would become the world capital re-named germania. he planned a massive architectural project for this transformation that included a triumphal arch based on (but much bigger than) the one in paris, and a volkshalle (or “people’s hall”) that was a dome based on (but much, much bigger than) the pantheon in rome. hitler’s architect, albert speer, wasn’t convinced that the swampland that berlin was built on could withstand the weight of the triumphal arch, so he devised an experiment to find out. this consisted of a large block of concrete (called the schwerbelastungskörper) that was constructed on the proposed site of the arch to measure how much, and how quickly, it would sink. turned out that it sank too fast, so the conclusion was that the arch wouldn’t work – it was just too heavy. interestingly, the block is still sitting there, and is now a historic site.

2. there was a little ice age that consisted of three dips in temperature world-wide between the 16th and the 19th centuries.

3. global warming might result in global cooling. if we have enough global warning, then the polar ice caps melt. this causes an increase in fresh water in the north atlantic ocean, which could result in a re-routing of ocean currents, potentially resulting in a repeat of the little ice age (see above…).

4. people who are raised from birth in bilingual environments are better able to shift attention, organise, prioritise and avoid falling into habitual responses. see here.

5. maurice jarre died.