Musical applications of nested comb filters for inharmonic resonator effects

Abstract

The comb filter is one of the basic building blocks in the world of digital filtering and signal processing, and an important component in a wide variety of musical and non-musical applications ranging from anti-aliasing of images and video to the design of numerous traditional audio effects. This paper describes a technique of using nested comb filter structures in order to design computationally stable inharmonic resonator effects with dynamically modifiable parameters. The number of parameters has additionally been kept to a minimum so that our inharmonic comb resonators can be easily and intuitively controlled for musical purposes. The comb filter implementations shown in this paper make use of new features of the Max/MSP 6 graphical programming environment, which allow both a more straightforward modification of and greater control over the low-level design of the comb filter algorithms themselves.