Phaser Notch Distribution

As mentioned above, it is desirable to avoid exact harmonic spacing of the notches, but what is the ideal non-uniform spacing? One possibility is to space the notches according to the critical bands of hearing, since essentially this gives a uniform notch density with respect to ``place'' along the basilar membrane in the ear. There is no need to follow closely the critical-band structure, so that simple exponential spacing may be considered sufficiently perceptually uniform (corresponding to uniform spacing on a log frequency scale). Due to the immediacy of the relation between notch characteristics and the filter coefficients, the notches can easily be placed under musically meaningful control.

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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.