Pole Mapping with Optimal Zeros

We saw in the preceding sections that both the impulse-invariant and the matched- transformations map poles from the left-half plane to the interior of the unit circle in the plane via

where is the location of the th pole in the plane (assumed to lie in the strip to avoid aliasing). The zeros, on the other hand, were different because the impulse-invariant method started with the partial fraction expansion while the matched- transformation started with the factored form of the transfer function.

Therefore, an obvious generalization is to map the poles according to Eq.(8.8), but compute the zeros in some optimal way, such as by Prony's method [449, p. 393],[273,297].

It is hard to do better Eq.(8.8) as a pole mapping from to , when aliasing is avoided, because it preserves both the resonance frequency and bandwidth for a complex pole [449]. Therefore, good practical modeling results can be obtained by optimizing the zeros (residues) to achieve audio criteria given these fixed poles. Alternatively, only the least-damped poles need be constrained in this way, e.g., to fix and preserve the most important resonances of a stringed-instrument body or acoustic space.

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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.