Sawtooth wave
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A sawtooth wave is a periodic waveform that rises or falls approximately linearly and then returns abruptly to its starting value. Its graph resembles the teeth of a saw.
An ideal sawtooth contains a fundamental frequency and both even and odd harmonics whose amplitudes decrease in proportion to harmonic number. The abrupt discontinuity requires an infinite harmonic series in the mathematical idealisation.
Sawtooth waves occur in electronic oscillators, scanning circuits, signal generation, control systems, and musical synthesis. A rising and falling version have related but differently phased harmonic structures.
Because of its rich spectrum, a sawtooth is commonly filtered to produce brass-like, string-like, or other synthetic timbres. Real systems round the discontinuity because bandwidth is finite.
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- Source / publisher: Wikipedia
- URL type: WWW
- Credits: Wikipedia
- URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawtooth_wave