A General Antialiasing Method for Sine Hard Sync

Authors
Pier Paolo La Pastina1, Stefano D'Angelo1
Status
Published in Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx20in22), pp. 109–114, Vienna, Austria, September 2022
1
Orastron Srl, Sessa Cilento, Italy
BibTeX
@inproceedings{lapastina22sinesync,
  title={A General Antialiasing Method for Sine Hard Sync},
  author={La Pastina, Pier Paolo and D'Angelo, Stefano},
  booktitle={Proc. 25\textsuperscript{th} Intl. Conf. Digital Audio Effects (DAFx20in22)},
  pages={109--114},
  month={September},
  year={2022},
  address={Vienna, Austria}
}

Abstract

Hard sync is a feature appearing in many analog synthesizers: it consists in retriggering a slave oscillator, regardless of its phase, every time a master oscillator completes its cycle. If this process is naïvely implemented digitally, it is subject to aliasing. While for sawtooth, square, and triangle waves several effective antialiasing methods have been developed, the literature is sparser concerning sine hard sync, arguably because discontinuities of infinite order are introduced which are more difficult to handle. In this paper, we introduce a new antialiasing algorithm for sine hard sync which is obtained by filtering the hard-synced sine with a FIR lowpass kernel, as opposed to existing methods based on the windowed sinc function. We show that our method yields lower computational cost and better aliasing reduction.

Implementation