[ot][spam][crazy][random]-3

[Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many]

I'm a little scared to take my fourier work into an actual fan
recording, given how hard the other project ended up being to engage.

Maybe I'll crazy a little around the ideal of finding the unknown
frequency efficiently.

It seems _relatively_ clear how to find the unknown frequency using a
feedback loop. It's not that clear whether it will be the "largest"
peak or the "lowest" peak or whatnot, but often in an FFT there is a
largest peak which is also pretty low, especially in an FFT of only
one signal.

Having intimately considered parts of the DFT, I can think about how
this peak happens because two sinusoids that are near the real
frequency resonate with it very accurately.

So, given you can find the two sinusoids bordering the highest peak,
you could then perform another DFT filled with frequencies tightly
packed around those two sinusoids, and from them find a much more
accurate depiction of the peak.

You wouldn't even need to use sinusoids, you could form a frequency
matrix out of your current best guess as to the waveform.

It's an old idea, and the feedback loop would be short, and I'd like
to try implementing it. But I guess what's active for me is more the
idea of thinking about it a little more [maybe unfortunately]. Maybe
it can get smaller and simpler, with less feedback structure. A small
reusable component?

In the end, we can only represent a frequency with so much accuracy:
that is, we only _need_ a frequency represented with so much accuracy.
If we know the accuracy of the frequency of interest, we could craft
frequency matrices that are much more effective.

We could also form an exact model of how the wave responds to
off-frequency harmonization, and from that try to calculate its
precise frequency.
This again becomes a chicken-and-egg problem, and one uses a feedback
loop to make a best guess, since we don't know the shape of the wave.

So, what collapses the recursive feedback is the fact that we can only
guess the shape of the wave as accurately as we have data on it. If we
only have 16 or 1024 or 1m samples of data, we can only describe the
wave with that many samples at once: and as soon as there is noise
added the order of magnitude of accurate samples of the wave and
accurate bits of precision immediately begins dropping.

So there is a bound to the concept of a feedback loop that depends on
the data rather than the precision, and thinking about this one can
begin to see that there would be again a matrix that can immediately
calculate the exact frequency, although this is not strongly and
directly apparent.  If you imagine newton's method applied to a linear
transformation made from every sample, one can show this would
collapse into a matrix. {although this leaves out the concept of
finding the maximum.}

So there are a few concepts here:
- how do i find the maximum in a way that can flatting feedback?
- do i need a model of the shape of the wave?
- what function best models the accuracy of a considered frequency vs the data?
- how does the real frequency best relate to the output of that function?

The maximum question is most recently interesting, but maybe in
general it helps to think about a simple example.

We could consider empty data containing only an exact nyquist
frequency, and then also data that contains only 1 full sinusoid.
Maybe also data that contains 2 full sinusoids.

The case of 1 full sinusoid is interesting. There isn't actually
information here that there is repeating data, other than the shape of
the data being a sinusoid. Most signal mediums carry data as
sinusoids, so it's meaningful to consider these. But most data is
carried in ways that are so dense that it's not very accurate to model
them as sinusoids. Both can happen. Kind of two different
possibilities.

In the case of sinusoids, it's very accurate to model things as
sinusoids and one could consider how multiplying two sinusoids creates
an output wave with frequency equal to their difference. There's
probably a space in that multiplication where the frequency can be
quickly derived. (Stated that way, it's a recursive problem, because
you then need the frequency of the output wave, which makes feedback.)

[[usually i would have just quickly implemented feedback solutions and
moved on to a larger problem. i seem to be in a situation where
planning is much easier than acting, and it's fun to find new
efficient things.]]

Then, in the situation where the signal is not related to sinusoids,
it kind of seems like the problem is one of convolution. Various
shifts of the signal against itself are compared.

What's more interesting is that, here, the signal could be shifted a
fractional amount, which relates to modeling its structure at a
different resolution.

It seems like it would be pretty useful to have a generic model for
what is likely to be a signal, and sample locality seems to be a thing
here.

In my recent tests, I'm using dense underlying signals with wildly
changing data, and then modelling them as being composed of sinusoids.
This is an additional challenge added to the situation of not knowing
the frequency of the signal, since we don't know the number of
sinusoids composing them.

I don't really know how much signal locality there is in something
like that, but I could use my code to downsample it and look at it,
theoretically.

Something I can remember is that there are no frequencies higher than
the nyquist frequency. So the wildest swing something is going to have
is from +1 at one sample, to -1 at the next. Nothing is going to be
swinging up and down twice in this test data, I think.

0936.

I'm having some cognitive concerns. Maybe it makes sense to consider
the sample depth of the signal unknown, or to imagine that there could
be wild swings present. The wild swing areas would be considered
noise, I suppose, since there isn't enough information on them. One
way of considering noise, in my opinion, would be signals that are too
small, high frequency, loud, numerous, to discern.

0937

I'm thinkiing of that part of the feedback where it helps to model the
signal. This originally rose in the idea of considering how the signal
might behave if multiplied by an off-frequency signal (or summed with
one).
Given data for the signal, we can algorithmically sum or multiply that
data by a scaled form of the signal, and algorithmically plot a chart
of how different offsets result in different outputs. I'm thinking
this might be doable in a linear way to condense into a matrix.

That's a bit much for me to consider right now it seems.

Maybe it's more interesting to implement feedback right now!