Proc. of the 14th Int. Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx-11), Paris, France, September 19-23, 2011 Proc. of the 14th International Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx-11), Paris, France, September 19-23, 2011 MODELING OF THE CARBON MICROPHONE NONLINEARITY FOR A VINTAGE TELEPHONE SOUND EFFECT Sami Oksanen, Vesa Välimäki Department of Signal Processing and Acoustics, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland
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[email protected] ABSTRACT The scope of this paper is to introduce a method for modeling the nonlinear features of a carbon microphone to create a vintage The telephone sound effect is widely used in music, television and telephone sound effect. The proposed model is flexible and can the film industry. This paper presents a digital model of the carbon be adjusted to meet the demands of the computational efficiency. microphone nonlinearity which can be used to produce a vintage The modeling accuracy can be increased in occasions where more telephone sound effect. The model is constructed based on mea- realistic outcome is wanted. surements taken from a real carbon microphone. The proposed This paper is organized as follows. in Sec. 2 the key ele- model is a modified version of the sandwich model previously ment of the vintage telephone, the carbon microphone, is reviewed. used for nonlinear telephone handset modeling. Each distortion Next, the measured distortion characteristics of a carbon micro- component can be modeled individually based on the desired fea- phone are presented. In Sec. 3 the modeling of the carbon micro- tures. The computational efficiency can be increased by lumping phone nonlinearity is inspected.