Summary

We see that when measuring sinusoidal peaks, it is important to know the minimum frequency separation of the peaks, and to choose an FFT window which is long enough to resolve the peaks accurately. Generally speaking, the window must ``see'' at least 1.5 cycles of the minimum difference frequency. The rectangular window ``sees'' its full length. Other windows, which are all tapered in some way (Chapter 3), see an effective duration less than the window length in samples. Further details regarding theoretical and empirical estimates are given in [1].

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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.