Clipping / distortion shaping (development&design)

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RobC
Posts: 1833
Joined: 10 Mar 2018

07 Sep 2019

Basic rule: the incoming value is not let to go above the set threshold.

Whenever it does go above the threshold, it's up to us what we change the value to. Fixing it to the same value as the threshold, results in hard clipping at that level.

What I want to do, is simply shaping that value, with another incoming value. Which could be anything from basic analog waveforms (I guess a sine wave would do something similar to soft clipping) or any type of audio signal.

How would you do that? Or is it as easy as applying amplitude modulation to it?

Simply put, for example, I want the square shaped common clipping, to look like say, a sawtooth. Might not be that easy after all, cause obviously, clipping doesn't happen at a fixed, static frequency. So if a modulator signal is a synth playing a sawtooth note, maybe it would need frequency modulation from a duplicate, raw audio of the original?

Or is this generally impossible?

RobC
Posts: 1833
Joined: 10 Mar 2018

08 Sep 2019

HUMP

Surely somebody has a clue about this!

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Loque
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Joined: 28 Dec 2015

08 Sep 2019

To me it sounds like you want to morph a given sound into a different one. It would need exact sync in frequency and phase, which is pretty impossible as an fx. You just could blend between the signals of your choice or as you mentioned modulate them, as long as the signals are synced.
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RobC
Posts: 1833
Joined: 10 Mar 2018

09 Sep 2019

Loque wrote:
08 Sep 2019
To me it sounds like you want to morph a given sound into a different one. It would need exact sync in frequency and phase, which is pretty impossible as an fx. You just could blend between the signals of your choice or as you mentioned modulate them, as long as the signals are synced.
Maybe granular synthesis could help, but that doesn't come without artifacts. I guess the simple ways are things like soft clipping which can be done with a mathematical process.

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Loque
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09 Sep 2019

Well, you could try to transform the signal with a good wave shaper. I never tried to completely transform a signal into another, but maybe it works. The wave shape need to support completely free form shaping,which transforms every signal signal into another depending on the gain. Is this amplitude modulation?
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RobC
Posts: 1833
Joined: 10 Mar 2018

10 Sep 2019

Loque wrote:
09 Sep 2019
Well, you could try to transform the signal with a good wave shaper. I never tried to completely transform a signal into another, but maybe it works. The wave shape need to support completely free form shaping,which transforms every signal signal into another depending on the gain. Is this amplitude modulation?
I guess so, if it's based on amplitude. Point would be something completely flexible where the modulator could be any kind of audio.

The interesting thing is, when hard clipping, the whole thing turns into square waves, right? And in the past, there even were such sound cards (or just decoding methods for PC speakers?) for early PCs, which generated sounds entirely from square waves. This is what kind of made me wonder how it all would sound with different wave forms.

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