Hi there,

Not sure if this is the right area of the forums to ask this, but this is a music related question. Electric violins work through "pick ups", which are transducers, right? Please correct me if I'm wrong. Can we have a transducer that only picks up some harmonics of the Fundamental pitch, instead of all of them? There are some digital plugins that we can have on the computer that analyze the digital signal, execute pitch detection, then it locates the harmonics and you can choose to remove some of them if you like; the problem with this is that it causes some latency, as the harmonic removal is being done after the signal has been released. So can we instead have a transducer that does this at the source, only picks up some over others?

 

Analog electronics can reduce the level of the fundamental frequency, reduce the level of some harmonics and increase the level of some harmonics.
A highpass filter cuts low frequencies.
A lowpass filter cuts high frequencIes.
A notch filter cuts one or a few frequencies.

A transducer usually has a fairly flat frequency response over most audio frequencies.

 

A transducer really can't do that because of the wide range of frequencies it has to respond to.

One way would be to have some type of notch filter that would track the the fundamental and suppress it on the fly.
Not a trivial task.

A high speed signal processor with the right software might be able to do it.
Here are some references for tracking notch filters.

 

The first link in the google search you shared: https://www.researchgate.net/public...Filters_for_Frequency_Estimation_and_Tracking

it's very informative and so far seems to be exactly what I'm looking for! Thank you so much. As you said, not a trivial task. Frequency detection for the fundamental and its harmonics...all on the fly. I'll keep reading.

I guess the other option, which I suspected is more realistic to begin with, is to do digital sound design to sculpt the timbre to my liking and have these patches played by an instrument...instead of having an instrument play a non-timbrally adjusted sound and then expecting some cool technology to sculpt it on the fly. I'll keep reading though.