Timothy Place

For this half-hour edition of our FFT series, I'm going to take the Max externals we created in part 5 of this series and use them to help plumb the mysteries of complex numbers and their part in FFT processing. 

We'll be looking at how phase is represented, and why it matters. Pull up a chair....

Learn more about the details of FFT math, and especially about how Complex Numbers are used in FFT processing.

Advanced Max: FFTs, Part 6

fft-part6.zip

For this half-hour edition of our FFT series, I'm going to take the Max externals we created in part 5 of this series and use them to help plumb the mysteries of complex numbers and their part in FFT processing. 

We'll be looking at how phase is represented, and why it matters.  Pull up a chair....

All the tutorials in this series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7.

advanced-max-ffts-part-6

Thank you again. Great tutorial and, though I somewhat remember this stuff it's been well worthwhile. Your explanations have the right depth and you pick on the juicy bits.

Thank you again.  Great tutorial and, though I somewhat remember this stuff it's been well worthwhile.  Your explanations have the right depth and you pick on the juicy bits.
I hope part 7 won't be too long away.


thanks for sharing this nice series of tutorials. The patch showing the phases of all bins has a little issue with the fft indexes. I've fixed this (and mapped the range of the noise to match that of the sine) in the patch below.

There's a small bug in the JS file: while the graphic representation of the complex number is correct, the imaginary number is printed with inverted sign. Attached a quick fix.

fft6.complex.js

There's a small bug in the JS file: while the graphic representation of the complex number is correct, the imaginary number is printed with inverted sign.  Attached a quick fix.