Normaliser Built From Scratch

What it does

Audio Normaliser built from basic elements.

A measurement of peak audio amplitude is inverted (via the One over Control block) to generate a gain-reduction control signal (in red) which is multiplied by the input, thus normalising the output amplitude approximately to unity.

In this example, the Simple Gain block is used to artificially reduce the amplitude of the audio signal. The effect of the normaliser is to restore the amplitude to the maximum value without clipping. Likewise, if the audio signal has a large amplitude (e.g. obtained by replacing the Simple Gain block with a Large Gain block), the effect of the normaliser will be to reduce the amplitude to the maximum value without clipping.

Experiment with the slider settings of all blocks to explore the behaviour of the normaliser.

Effects used

Envelope Follower (peak)Audio x Control +Gain Gain Reciprocal (1/x)

6 blocks 6 connections

In WaveWarp, 1998

How the original documented it

Audio Normaliser built from basic elements. A measurement of peak audio amplitude is inverted (via the One over Control block) to generate a gain-reduction control signal (in red) which is multiplied by the input, thus normalising the output amplitude approximately to unity. In this example, the Simple Gain block is used to artificially reduce the amplitude of the audio signal. The effect of the normaliser is to restore the amplitude to the maximum value without clipping. Likewise, if the audio signal has a large amplitude (e.g. obtained by replacing the Simple Gain block with a Large Gain block), the effect of the normaliser will be to reduce the amplitude to the maximum value without clipping. Experiment with the slider settings of all blocks to explore the behaviour of the normaliser.

Components used (1998)

Input WAV filePeak ValueOutput Single-Mono WAVE DriverMultiply Audio by Control with GainSimple gainControl Reciprocal