Linear Phase Signals

In practice, a signal may be said to be linear phase when its phase is of the form

where is any real constant (usually an integer), and is an indicator function which takes on the values 0 or over the points , . An important class of examples is when the signal is regarded as a filter impulse response.^7.14 What all such signals have in common is that they are symmetric about the time in the time domain (as we will show on the next page). Thus, the term ``linear phase signal'' often really means ``a signal whose phase is linear between discontinuities.''

---

Order a Hardcopy of Mathematics of the DFT

Previous: Linear Phase Terms
Next: Zero Phase Signals

---

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.