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Two-Pole
Partial Fraction Expansion
Note that every real two-pole resonator can be broken up into a sum of
two complex one-pole resonators:
 |
(B.7) |
where

and

are constants (generally complex). In this
``parallel one-pole'' form, it can be seen that the peak gain is no
longer equal to the resonance gain, since each one-pole
frequency
response is ``tilted'' near resonance by being summed with the
``skirt'' of the other one-pole resonator, as illustrated in
Fig.
B.9. This interaction between the positive- and
negative-frequency
poles is minimized by making the resonance sharper (

),
and by separating the pole frequencies

. The
greatest separation occurs when the resonance frequency is at
one-fourth the
sampling rate (

). However,
low-frequency resonances, which are by far the most common in audio
work, suffer from significant overlapping of the positive- and
negative-frequency poles.
To show Eq.
(B.7) is always true, let's solve in general for
and
given
and
. Recombining the right-hand side
over a common denominator and equating numerators gives
which implies
The solution is easily found to be
where we have assumed
im
, as necessary to have a
resonator in the first place.
Breaking up the two-pole real resonator into a parallel sum of two
complex one-pole resonators is a simple example of a partial
fraction expansion (PFE) (discussed more fully in §6.8).
Note that the inverse z transform of a sum of one-pole transfer
functions can be easily written down by inspection. In particular,
the impulse response of the PFE of the two-pole resonator (see
Eq.
(B.7)) is clearly
Since

is real, we must have

, as we found above
without assuming it. If

, then

is a real
sinusoid
created by the sum of two
complex sinusoids spinning in opposite
directions on the unit circle.
Previous: Complex ResonatorNext: The BiQuad Section
About the Author: Julius Orion Smith III
Julius Smith's background is in electrical engineering (BS Rice 1975, PhD Stanford 1983). He is presently Professor of Music and Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Electrical Engineering at
Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), teaching courses and pursuing research related to signal processing applied to music and audio systems. See
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/ for details.