Convolution Example 2: ADSR Envelope

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In this example, the input signal is a sequence of two rectangular pulses, creating a piecewise constant function, depicted in Fig.7.4(a). The filter impulse response, shown in Fig.7.4(b), is a truncated exponential.^7.6

In this example, is again a causal smoothing-filter impulse response, and we could call it a ``moving weighted average'', in which the weighting is exponential into the past. The discontinuous steps in the input become exponential ``asymptotes'' in the output which are approached exponentially. The overall appearance of the output signal resembles what is called an attack, decay, release, and sustain envelope, or ADSR envelope for short. In a practical ADSR envelope, the time-constants for attack, decay, and release may be set independently. In this example, there is only one time constant, that of . The two constant levels in the input signal may be called the attack level and the sustain level, respectively. Thus, the envelope approaches the attack level at the attack rate (where the ``rate'' may be defined as the reciprocal of the time constant), it next approaches the sustain level at the ``decay rate'', and finally, it approaches zero at the ``release rate''. These envelope parameters are commonly used in analog synthesizers and their digital descendants, so-called virtual analog synthesizers. Such an ADSR envelope is typically used to multiply the output of a waveform oscillator such as a sawtooth or pulse-train oscillator. For more on virtual analog synthesis, see, for example, [75,74].

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Order a Hardcopy of Mathematics of the DFT

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written by 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.