ThinkDSP¶

This notebook contains code examples from Chapter 11: Modulation and sampling

Special thanks to my colleague Siddhartan Govindasamy; the sequence of topics in this notebook is based on material he developed for Signals and Systems at Olin College, which he and Oscar Mur-Miranda and I co-taught in Spring 2015.

In [1]:
from __future__ import print_function, division

import thinkdsp
import thinkplot

import numpy as np

import warnings
warnings.filterwarnings('ignore')

PI2 = 2 * np.pi

np.set_printoptions(precision=3, suppress=True)
%matplotlib inline


Convolution with impulses¶

To demonstrate the effect of convolution with impulses, I'll load a short beep sound.

In [2]:
wave = thinkdsp.read_wave('253887__themusicalnomad__positive-beeps.wav')
wave.normalize()
wave.plot()


Here's what it sounds like.

In [3]:
wave.make_audio()

Out[3]:

And here's a sequence of 4 impulses with diminishing amplitudes:

In [4]:
imp_sig = thinkdsp.Impulses([0.005, 0.3, 0.6, 0.9], amps=[1, 0.5, 0.25, 0.1])
impulses = imp_sig.make_wave(start=0, duration=1.0, framerate=wave.framerate)
impulses.plot()


If we convolve the wave with the impulses, we get 4 shifted, scaled copies of the original sound.

In [5]:
convolved = wave.convolve(impulses)
convolved.plot()


And here's what it sounds like.

In [6]:
convolved.make_audio()

Out[6]:

Amplitude modulation (AM)¶

The previous example gives some insight into how AM works.

In [7]:
wave = thinkdsp.read_wave('105977__wcfl10__favorite-station.wav')
wave.unbias()
wave.normalize()
wave.make_audio()

Out[7]:

Here's what the spectrum looks like:

In [8]:
spectrum = wave.make_spectrum()
spectrum.plot()


For the following examples, it will be more useful to look at the full spectrum, which includes the negative frequencies. Since we are starting with a real signal, the spectrum is always symmetric.

In [9]:
spectrum = wave.make_spectrum(full=True)
spectrum.plot()


Amplitude modulation works my multiplying the input signal by a "carrier wave", which is a cosine, 10 kHz in this example.

In [10]:
carrier_sig = thinkdsp.CosSignal(freq=10000)
carrier_wave = carrier_sig.make_wave(duration=wave.duration, framerate=wave.framerate)


The * operator performs elementwise multiplication.

In [11]:
modulated = wave * carrier_wave


The result sounds pretty horrible.

In [12]:
modulated.make_audio()

Out[12]:

Why? Because multiplication in the time domain corresponds to convolution in the frequency domain. The DFT of the carrier wave is two impulses; convolution with those impulses makes shifted, scaled copies of the spectrum.

Specifically, AM modulation has the effect of splitting the spectrum in two halves and shifting the frequencies by 10 kHz (notice that the amplitudes are half what they were in the previous plot).

In [13]: