cycle~ waves look like squares?

Misty Jones's icon

I know that cycle~ generates (co)sine waves. Looking at cycle~ output through scope~, as the pitch goes up, they look like square waves, even with a reduced amplitude. Looking at the same wave through spectroscope~, you can definitely see it's a sine wave (only shows one harmonic), and it certainly sounds like one. Why do they look like squares in scope~?

Jean-Francois Charles's icon

Aliasing, depends on the scope~ settings. Same reason why you see wheels going backwards when the car is moving forward in movies. If you attach some patch (copy compress then paste in your post), forum users could give a more specific answer.

Misty Jones's icon

thanks for your response!

Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.

Misty Jones's icon

I figured it out. needed to set the buffer size and samples per buffer! Thanks for your guidance.

Roman Thilenius's icon

it even has an automode, which works quite well for simple waveforms. but setting the buffersize to a fixed rate can sometimes make more sense.

Pedro Santos's icon

If you don't like automode, you can configure the trigger mode and value and lower the samples per pixel.
See right scope's inspector for more details.

Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.

Misty Jones's icon

awesome - thanks to all for the help!