Damping Filter Design

When dispersion can be neglected (as it typically can in many cases, such as for guitar strings), we may use linear-phase filter design methods, such as provided by the functions remez, firls, and fir2 in matlab. Since strings are usually very lightly damped, such linear-phase filter designs give high quality at very low orders. Another approach is to fit a low-order IIR filter, such as by applying invfreqz to a minimum-phase version of the desired amplitude response, and then subtract the phase-response of the resulting filter from the desired phase-response used in a subsequent allpass design. (Alternatively, the phase response of the loop filter can simply be neglected, as long as tuning is unaffected. If tuning is affected, the tuning allpass can be adjusted to compensate.)

---

Previous: General Loop-Filter Design
Next: Dispersion Filter Design

Order a Hardcopy of Physical Audio Signal Processing

---

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.