Portnoff Windows

In 1976 [201], Portnoff observed that any window of the form

being by construction, will obey the weak constraint, where is the number of spectral samples. In this result, is any window function whatsoever, and the sinc function is defined as usual by

(the unit-amplitude sinc function with zeros at all nonzero integers).

Portnoff suggested that, in practical usage, windowed data segments longer that the FFT size should be time-aliased about length prior to taking the FFT. This result is readily derived from the definition of the time-normalized STFT introduced in Eq.(7.3):

where as usual.

Choosing allows multiple sidelobes of the sinc function to alias in on the main lobe. This gives channel filters in the frequency domain which are sharper bandpass filters while remaining COLA. I.e., there is less channel cross-talk in the frequency domain. However, the time-aliasing corresponds to undersampling in the frequency domain, implying less robustness to spectral modifications, since such modifications can disturb the time-domain aliasing cancellation. Since the hop size needs to be less than , the overall filter bank based on a Portnoff window remains oversampled in the time domain.

---

Previous: The Nyquist Property on the Unit Circle
Next: Downsampled STFT Filter Banks

Order a Hardcopy of Spectral 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.