A set of analog-behaving filter actors

Background

The earliest electronic music instruments were analog in nature, i.e., they were built up from circuitry whose internal voltages were designed to be analogs (hence the name) of the physical acoustic pressure waves found in acoustic instruments. The filter circuit was used to emphasize resonances and de-emphasize excess harmonics produced at the raw output of certain electronic oscillators (like Moog's). Without the filters, these generators would sound "buzzy", which in itself was (and still is) considered a neat effect, but not if the desired result is the emulation of an acoustic instrument. Since this important function actually removes, or "subtracts" harmonics from a sound, this kind of synthesis was called "subtractive synthesis". This term is also used to contrast the type of synthesis from the "additive", or Fourier sum-of-partials method more prevalent on computers in the early days of digital synthesis. So, since the start, the filter has always been an important element of electronic sound synthesis.

In use, the analog filter is a very straightforward element to understand and control. It comes in three basic types, the lowpass, highpass, and bandpass. Generally, the lowpass is used to "muffle" the sound, the highpass is used to make the sound "thinner", and the bandpass makes the sound as if it were passing through a phone line or a resonant cavity (like a human mouth puckering up to whistle), depending on the amount of resonance in the filter element.

Analog filters are most easily characterized by their frequency response, or the relative gain of the system as a function of applied sinewave frequency. The frequency response of the lowpass is flat (constant gain wrt frequency) at low frequencies, while the highpass is flat at high frequencies. The flat region is called the "pass-band" of the filter, and its location along frequency gives rise to the respective names of the filter types.

At a certain critical frequency, called the corner frequency, the response starts to fall off, so that the amplitudes of frequencies in this band are de-emphasized relative to the passband. The rate of fall-off, also called the rolloff, asymptotically approaches a logarithmically-defined constant which for natural systems approximates N * 6 dB/octave, where N is the order of the filter system. So, a higher-order filter rolls off more rapidly than a lower-order one. The critical frequency is defined as the frequency at which the response falls 3dB from flat, i.e. the half-power point. Spectrally, the lowpass and highpass types are complements of one another. The lowpass response is considered to roll off in the direction of increasing frequency, and the highpass is considered to roll off in the direction of decreasing frequency.

A filter of type bandpass rolls off on both sides of the critical frequency. So, for the bandpass, this frequency is known as the center frequency. The width of the passband is typically defined in logarithmic terms for the analog bandpass response, as the ratio of the upper corner frequency (the corner frequency above the center frequency) to the lower corner frequency, in octaves. A narrower response (e.g. bandwidth of less than an octave) results in a system with less damping, producing a more resonant quality to the sound. In the limit, the system becomes an oscillator, whose frequency of oscillation equals the center frequency. Since the bandpass must roll off on both sides, it can only exist with filter systems of even order, the minimum order thus being the classic second-order response from physics.

Two other basic response types are afforded by the analog filter: the notch, and the allpass. The notch is useful for suppressing or completely cancelling out a certain frequency or range of frequencies. It is in fact the complement of the bandpass response; it suppresses in the passband of the bandpass (now that's a mouthful!), and it is flat where the bandpass is rolling off. Increasing the filter resonance reduces the width of the notch. In the extreme, the notch will cancel out only one frequency, but it will require perfect accuracy to properly place the hair-thin notch at that frequency. In practice, notches of less than 1/8 octave are not useful.

The allpass response is also not used very much in practice, at least for sound synthesis. Its frequency response is completely flat, so it does not overtly alter the "tone" of a sound; its effect is much more subtle. The allpass response rolls off in phase, so that a sinewave, swept upwards from dc, through the corner, and upwards, smoothly undergoes a negative phase transition of N * 180 degrees, where N is again the order of the filter. The frequency at the center of the phase transition corresponds to the critical frequency, and is also called the corner frequency or center frequency. Clasically, in communications systems the allpass filter is used for shaping time-domain wavelets, either to spread them out or to line them up in time to meet a certain transmission spec (like "crest factor", for example). In sound synthesis, the allpass has had a great heyday (and a big comeback) as a guitar effect. A high-order phase-shift network is built up from a long cascade of these elements, and the center frequency is swept sinusoidally (or sometimes with a triangle wave) at a rate varying from sub-hertz to 10 or so Hz, depending on the desired effect. This usage has formed the basis upon which famous effects like the Electro-Harmonix Small Stone and the Dunlop Univibe were built.

Care was taken in crafting this family of filter actors so that their control behavior would emulate that of analog filters. Ultimately, a filter implemented on a computer must take on the form of a digital filter. Unfortunately, textbook digital filters are developed to emulate certain types of fixed higher-order filter networks used in communications systems (like phone lines, for instance). However, the given transformations were able to be adapted to the intuitive kinds of filters used in music synthesizers. In particular, the analog state-variable filter (SVF) was emulated. This filter is ideal for sound synthesis, as it produces many responses for a single energy-storage element, or set of elements (one element per filter order, actually). This translates to fewer parts in the analog filter and to higher computational efficiency for a digital one, since each analog energy storage element to be emulated adds a corresponding MAC (multiply-accumulate) operation in the digital filter implementation.

Only the first and second order analog SVFs were emulated, since all higher orders can be built up by parallel or cascade combinations of these. In sound synthesis practice, filter orders typically are not higher than four except in special cases, as their relatively steep asymptotic rolloffs do not sound "natural".

The analog state-variable filter (SVF) presents the user with a very intuitive control interface. Each control affects one, and only one, of the parameters described above (i.e. they do not interact, so that adjusting the resonance, for instance, does not affect the center frequency). This control separation is not always the case, particularly in digital filters. A means of mapping the analog parameters to digital ones was found which preserves this control separation, so that, except for other digital artifacts like aliasing and quantization, these filters operate essentially like analog SVFs.

Actors

The BiQuadFilterActor implements a second-order SVF based on the classic bi-quad architecture. This filter can simultaneously produce a lowpass, bandpass, highpass, allpass and notch response. All five responses share the same corner/center frequency, which is controllable dynamically by the user. All responses are available at once, and their relative gains may be individually set. By setting more than one gain to a nonzero value, the responses may be combined. The resonance of the internal filter element is also controllable, and affects all five responses simultaneously.

Usage

Order1 Filter Messages

BiQuad Filter Messages