Audible Aliasing Distortion in Digital Audio Synthesis

Abstract

This paper deals with aliasing distortion in digital audio signal synthesis of classic periodic waveforms with infinite Fourier series, for electronic musical instruments. When these waveforms are generated in the digital domain then the aliasing appears due to its unlimited bandwidth. There are several techniques for the synthesis of these signals that have been designed to avoid or reduce the aliasing distortion. However, these techniques have high computing demands. One can say that today's computers have enough computing power to use these methods. However, we have to realize that today’s computer-aided music production requires tens of multi-timbre voices generated simultaneously by software synthesizers and the most of the computing power must be reserved for hard-disc recording subsystem and real-time audio processing of many audio channels with a lot of audio effects. Trivially generated classic analog synthesizer waveforms are therefore still effective for sound synthesis. We cannot avoid the aliasing distortion but spectral components produced by the aliasing can be masked with harmonic components and thus made inaudible if sufficient oversampling ratio is used. This paper deals with the assessment of audible aliasing distortion with the help of a psychoacoustic model of simultaneous masking and compares the computing demands of trivial generation using oversampling with those of other methods.