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Let's say we have a wave that is made up of 3 sine waves all at different frequencies. It would be easy to figure out what those 3 original sine waves were by either basic observation, or trial and error. My question in regards to this though, is there a surefire way to retrieve the original building blocks (the 3 original sine waves) from the resulting wave?

Could the suggested method be used to find the building blocks (original sine waves) of a wave built up of n sine waves? Or is solution dependant on n. Ie. 0+1^2+2^2+3^2+...+n^2.

All help is appreciated.

Michael King
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    Do you know about the Fourier Transform, and the discrete version the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)? That would be the preferred tool. The Python library numpy has FFT routines, C/C++ implementations are abundant too. – BrianO Oct 30 '15 at 00:09
  • Thanks Brian! I believe this is exactly what I'm looking for. – Michael King Oct 30 '15 at 17:30
  • You're welcome. I spoke a little loosely: the discrete version of the Fourier Transform is.. the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT). The FFT is a particularly efficient implementation. As luck would have it, I recently came across a couple of very good articles on this topic which I think you'll get alot out of: DFT article, and FFT article. Both are from a blog on various DSP topics; the 2 cited are later in the series. – BrianO Oct 30 '15 at 17:46
  • "FFT is a[n] ... implementation": make that algorithm. – BrianO Oct 30 '15 at 23:42

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