Thursday, 7 November 2013

Bipolar and Unipolar Signal Problem

                           Converting bipolar to unipolar signal is a common mistake that we always made in Reaktor. When we want to connect bipolar signal to unipolar signal we need to convert them otherwise it will not sound good because of polarity flapping. For example, when we are building a tremolo effect, we use LFO to modulate the Amplitude of the wave shape by multiply with the Envelope Generator signal so we can use the Envelope Generator to shape the Amplitude of the wave shape as well. But the problem here is that the LFO signal is bipolar -1 to +1 and the Envelope Generator is an unipolar 0 - 1. Therefore, multiply these two signals will not give us a perfect tremolo effect. So to solve this problem we need to convert the bipolar to unipolar signal. All we have to do here is to take the output from LFO that is -1 to +1 then rescale it in half and multiply by 0.5. Now it goes to -0.5 to +0.5 then add on 0.5, so the -0.5 and +0.5 become 0 and the 0.5+0.5 become 1. So we basically take bipolar -1 to +1 signal going into unipolar 0-1 signals. This it the problem that we encountered when we built our tremolo effect and it took us a while to understand it and solved the problem. Also as you can hear the samples that we recorded below. It used sine wave and the frequency rate was set to 1Hz. The one without converting bipolar to unipolar never gave us a perfect 1 Hz oscillation. Other one with converting bipolar to unipolar gave us a perfect tremolo effect. Obviously, if you compare two of them, you will definitely hear the different between them.

                                                    With Converting bipolar to unipolar
Without Converting bipolar to unipolar

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