Phase Continuation
When interpolating the STFT across time for TSM, it is straightforward to interpolate spectral magnitude, as we saw above. Interpolating spectral phase, on the other hand, is tricky, because there's no exact way to do it [220]. There are two conflicting desiderata when deciding how to continue phase from one frame to the next:
- (1)
- Sinusoids should ``pick up where they left off'' in the previous frame.
- (2)
- The relative phase from bin to bin should be preserved in each FFT.
When condition (2) is violated, the signal frame suffers dispersion in the time domain. For steady-state signals (filtered noise and/or steady tones), temporal dispersion should not be audible, while frames containing distinct pulses will generally become more ``smeared out'' in time.
It is not possible in general to satisfy both conditions (1) and (2) simultaneously, but either can be satisfied at the expense of the other. Generally speaking, ``transient frames'' should emphasize condition (2), allowing the WOLA overlap-add cross-fade to take care of the phase discontinuity at the frame boundaries. For stationary segments, phase continuation, preserving condition (1), is more valuable.
It is often sufficient to preserve relative phase across FFT bins (i.e., satisfy condition (2)) only along spectral peaks and their immediate vicinity [142,143,141,138,215,238].
Next Section:
TSM Examples
Previous Section:
TSM by Resampling STFTs Across Time