Frequency Response

Definition: The frequency response of an LTI filter may be defined as the Fourier transform of its impulse response. In particular, for finite, discrete-time signals , the sampled frequency response may be defined as

The complete (continuous) frequency response is defined using the DTFT (see §B.1), i.e.,

where the summation limits are truncated to because is zero for and . Thus, the DTFT can be obtained from the DFT by simply replacing by , which corresponds to infinite zero-padding in the time domain. Recall from §7.2.10 that zero-padding in the time domain gives ideal interpolation of the frequency-domain samples (assuming the original DFT included all nonzero samples of ).

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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.