FFT

To apply an FFT to a signal, you need to specify somehow how long the FFT window is supposed to be. Jipes lets you do this in multiple ways. The most useful one is probably to use a SlidingWindow. That’s a processor that lets you say: I always want my signal in windows of X frames (window size) and I want those frames to be Y frames apart (hop size).

Any following FFT processor will then apply the FFT to the whole window. In practice the code looks like this:

fftPipe = new SignalPipeline<AudioBuffer, LinearFrequencySpectrum>(
    new Mono(),
    new SlidingWindow(windowLength, hopSize),
    new Mapping<AudioBuffer>(AudioBufferFunctions.createMapFunction(new WindowFunctions.Hamming(windowLength))),
    new FFT()
);

This will produce a pipeline that takes stereo AudioBuffers, applies a window, a Hamming function, and transforms them into LinearFrequencySpectrum objects. Those objects let you easily access magnitudes, powers and frequencies. Keep in mind, that if you pump this pipeline, you will only get the last frame as result in the result map. To actually process all frames, you will need to add another processor to the pipeline after new FFT().

Note that the default FFT implementation is written in pure Java. If you need a higher performance FFT, consider implementing a native version (as it is done in beaTunes). See the documentation of FFTFactory for details on how to register your optimized FFT.

Constant Q Transform

Instead of a linear spectrum, a constant Q transform produces a log frequency spectrum. This is especially useful, when trying to extract pitch related information. The approach is pretty much the same as for the FFT. The main difference is, that one needs to specify the frequency boundaries of the lowest and the frequency of the highest bin. Additionally, the number of bins per octave is required.

constantQPipe = new SignalPipeline<AudioBuffer, LogFrequencySpectrum>(
    new Mono(),
    new SlidingWindow(windowLength, hopSize),
    new Mapping<AudioBuffer>(AudioBufferFunctions.createMapFunction(new WindowFunctions.Hamming(windowLength))),
    new ConstantQTransform(25.956543f, 3520.0f, 12 * 3)
);

The sample code shown above would split each octave into 36 bins (3 per semitone). Since the built-in constant Q transform makes use of the FFT, it benefits from a fast FFTFactory.

Again, keep in mind, that if you pump this pipeline, you will only get the last frame as result in the result map. To process all frames, you will need to add another processor to the pipeline after new ConstantQTransform(...).

Multiple Bands

Often one does neither need a log frequency spectrum, nor a linear spectrum, but rather one for a defined set of bands, e.g. bark bands. To create such a MultiBandSpectrum, just process the given regular spectrum one step further:

float[] bandBoundaries = new float[] {1000, 2000, 3000};
multiBandPipe = new SignalPipeline<AudioBuffer, MultiBandSpectrum>(
    new Mono(),
    new SlidingWindow(windowLength, hopSize),
    new Mapping<AudioBuffer>(AudioBufferFunctions.createMapFunction(new WindowFunctions.Hamming(windowLength))),
    new FFT()
    new MultiBand(bandBoundaries)
);

The configured MultiBand reduces the FFT spectrum to two bands. The first containing the powers between 1kHz and 2kHz, the second containing the powers between 2kHz and 3kHz.

If now, for whatever reason, you want to process each band with a different pipeline, you can use a BandSplit signal splitter (see Split/Join).