vault / music / sampling.md

Sampling

Music 64 words 2 outgoing 1 backlinks

One word, three jobs. In audio, the sample rate decides which frequencies survive - below Nyquist the highs fold back as aliasing. In decoding, temperature flattens or sharpens the distribution before you draw - zero is greedy, high is chaos. In a bandit, the posterior draw is what turns uncertainty into exploration. Same move everywhere: draw from the distribution, but choose the distribution first.

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[[ Thompson sampling ]] Reach for it when traffic is live and a fixed A/B test would keep sending users to a losing arm: sample each arm's posterior, serve the highest draw, and let uncertainty supply the exploration. In the production pattern from the... [[ FM synthesis ]] One oscillator wobbles another's pitch fast enough that you hear new partials instead of vibrato. The carrier sets the base pitch, the modulator sets the brightness, and the index sets how much: low index is a round tone, high index...