Chapter 7: General Sonic Applications
I trust the speed. I love the fear. The music comes. The burning spear - Sonic Youth
Harmonic Clipper
Although simple in principle, this example demonstrates the power and versatility of DSP. The
idea of clipping a signal to some maximum swing originated in the vacuum tube era. Back in
the day, before Sonic Youth, when an input signal saturated an amplifier, the signal was clipped
or flattened at the top and the bottom. No more amplification was possible. This clipping
produces harmonic distortion, because - going back to our frequency domain point of view - an
infinite number of sine waves are required to reconstruct the rectangular corners of a square
wave. [OCWAB7]. We will start with a one sided clipper, and then extend the example.
RIDE(tm) Example -Clipper1.lst