Transient (acoustics)

In acoustics and audio, a transient is a high amplitude, short-duration sound at the beginning of a waveform that occurs in phenomena such as musical sounds, noises or speech.[1][2] Transients do not necessarily directly depend on the frequency of the tone they initiate. It contains a high degree of non-periodic components and a higher magnitude of high frequencies than the harmonic content of that sound.[3]

Transients are more difficult to encode with many audio compression algorithms, causing pre-echo.[4]

See also

• Prefix (acoustics)
• Impulse function
• Onset (audio)
• Transient response – a common electrical engineering term that may be the source of the idea of an acoustic "transient"

References

1. Crocker, Malcolm J., ed. (1998). Handbook of acoustics. A Wiley-Interscience publication (Nachdr. ed.). New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons, Inc. p. 119. ISBN 978-0-471-25293-1.
2. Gibson, William A. (2007). The Ultimate Live Sound Operator's Handbook. NY: Hal Leonard Books. p. 49. ISBN 978-1-4234-1971-6.
3. "Transient Detection and Editing".
4. Painter, Ted; Spanias, Andreas (April 2000). "Perceptual Coding of Digital Audio". IEEE. 88 (4): 471–474. doi:10.1109/5.842996. S2CID 1390521.