Adjunct Professor CCRMA, Stanford University Stanford, California, United States
Modal processors and synthesizers require determining resonant frequencies and decay rates of a system. We introduce a simple, efficient, and flexible approach to compute these parameters when speed is of the essence. The approach compares DFT peaks in two impulse response windows at different points in time to obtain the modal frequencies and decay rates. For anything but wholly-linear cases, this is an approximation. We study the behavior on weakly nonlinear samples such as room and spring impulse responses, and tonal/atonal instruments.
