4 ms·
"A sawtooth is a wave that looks like the blade of a saw. It is pretty close to sinusoidal, so it sounds somewhat like a single tone, but there is some distorti
by ecocentrik 3y ago
"A sawtooth is a wave that looks like the blade of a saw. It is pretty close to sinusoidal, so it sounds somewhat like a single tone, but there is some distortion and harmonics; not nearly as much as you'd get from a square wave, though."
In Fourier terms, a sinusoidal is the fundamental frequency.
A square wave contains the fundamental frequency + all odd harmonics.
A saw wave contains the fundamental frequency + all odd and even harmonics.
No distortion is needed to shape a saw wave and the rest of what you said is inaccurate.
- mlyle 3y agoIt is distorted in the sense that a sine wave that has been put through a nonlinear process -- e.g. clipped to form a square wave; clipped and integrated to form a triangle; clipped and integrated asymmetrically to form a saw; etc. Total harmonic distortion measures the amount of power that you have in harmonics vs. the fundamental wave. A purely sinusoidal tone would have no energy in harmonics; a saw would have 44% of its energy in harmonics. Maybe you're nitpicking and saying that it's not "distortion", but harmonic distortion as a metric of how much energy is in harmonics-- because the primary way we used to get those harmonics is by distortion of a sine wave-- is common lingo.
- ecocentrik 3y agoMaybe I was nitpicking about the use of the term "distortion" (I prefer "transformation"), but I did want to clarify that saw waves are more harmonically rich and complex than square waves.
- mlyle 3y agoYah. I did screw up the comment, in that I had intended to talk about triangles first and then mention asymmetry. The fact that you have second harmonics is what makes saws so useful as a basis function for synthesis.