[PD] [OT] spectral irregularity to measure noisiness (was Re:about fiddle~)

[Matteo Sisti Sette]

> That's not actually a correct implementation of spectral flatness. What
> you've done is more like the arithmetic mean of the log-magnitude
> spectrum over arithmetic mean of the mag spectrum. Whereas the SFM is
> the _geometric_ mean of the mag spectrum over over its arithmetic mean.

Isn't the arithmetic mean of the log-magnitude equivalent to the log of the 
geometric mean of the magnitude? so if you reverse the logarithm after 
calculating it, as I did in my attachment, you obtain the geometric mean of 
the magnitude.
I think this is the only way of calculating the geometric mean of such a 
large vector (or isn't it?), because actually computing the product would 
soon overflow the precision of a float giving either +INF or zero (even with 
no zero bin) (I had tried that first).

Also, I may be missing something, but I think your attached patch only 
calculates the product and sum of the LAST TWO bins. Note you use
[fexpr~ $x[0]+$x[-1]] and [fexpr~ $x[0]*$x[-1]]
where I would use:
[fexpr~ $x[0]+$y[-1]] and [fexpr~ $x[0]*$y[-1]]


> The problem is that in order to obtain the geometric mean, you need to
> ignore bins containing 0, otherwise you will get an overall value of 0
> if there are '0 bins' present.

Yeah here you are right. I didn't take care of that.
Well, no, wait... I did. Using [rmstodb~]-100 for the log calculation, a 0 
bin would be clipped to a -100 log value, thus being computed as a very very 
small but nonzero bin.
Not sure it is the most correct thing to do, but it kinda works.


> At any rate, both of the Pd implementations using [fexpr~] are horribly
> inefficient,

So horribly? I got a 4-5% CPU usage, which may be very much but I don't need 
to apply it to more than two or three signals.

> That's why I recommended Irregularity. It tells you roughly the same
> thing, but is a nicer feature in terms of computation cost,

I'll try that out and make some comparisons.

However having a look at the formulas (if again i'm not missing something), 
it seems to me that it should have a similar computation cost: you still 
need to iterate over the vector, don't you?


Thanks,
m.