Week Two – Reflectin on Lyons Reading
I just want to say that this book is really great. It is by far one of the most technical books I have read in a long time, which has made me go back and read each chapter twice, but I am getting a lot of mileage out of Lyon’s text.
The second chapter on periodic sampling really helped me understand the frequency-domain ambiguity that is associated with discrete-time signal samples. When we are sampling a given frequency, the sample rate can cause the sampled signal to become indistinguishable from another signal that may also be able to pass through the points of the discrete sequence.
The rest of the chapter discussed techniques and the calculations involved in sampling low-pass signals and sampling bandpass signals. Lyons demonstrated how analog low-pass filters could be used to focus on the signal of interest thus cutting out noise on either side our source signal. I found the last half of the chapter on sampling bandpass signals very in depth. I’m still still not clear how this could be applied to MAX/MSP patches, but I am getting a solid foundation in the theory behind digital signal processing. Lyons quotes the Greek mathematician Menaechmus at the beginning of his book as stating to Alexandar the Great:
There is no royal road to mathematics.
So I am content to make the journey of the great hill to find an occasional small plateau to rest and then resume my journey.
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