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Minimum-Phase Waveform Reconstruction

Waveforms are not desirable as a perceptual representation of sound, even though they hold all the information we need to understand sound. The phase component of waveforms adds a dimension of complexity that is, to a large extent, filtered out by the ear/brain system. But, waveforms could be used if a uniquely mappable phase constraint could be applied. One possibility is to reconstruct the waveform using a minimum-phase constraint, i.e. all the poles and zeros are reflected to lie within the unit circle in the Z-plane. Such a representation has the advantage of being extremely sensitive to fine-scale temporal information in the signal. However, the order of time for which the waveform represents information is much below the threshold of human auditory perception.



Michael Casey
Fri Mar 22 15:49:22 EST 1996