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I'm working on a program that has to do with adding sound waves on top of sound waves. Currently what I'm doing is simply an average of the two waves. So if I have wave A, and I want to write wave B 'on top' of it, every sample in the new A is equal to the average of two matching samples in the original waves.

This works decently, however sometimes it leads to a significant decrease of loudness in wave A. Is there a better way to combine sound waves?

For example, if I have a sound wave of a guitar playing, I want to be able to add on top of it a sound wave of a saxophone playing, without decreasing the volume of the guitar. What's the best way to do this?

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  • $\begingroup$ I think this is off topic here, but if so we could migrate it to Signal Processing. $\endgroup$
    – David Z
    Mar 27, 2015 at 17:04
  • $\begingroup$ Why not just sum them, rather than average them? $\endgroup$
    – CR Drost
    Mar 27, 2015 at 18:02
  • $\begingroup$ Do all the math in floating point, and normalize the data when it comes time to write ints to the output file. $\endgroup$
    – Solomon Slow
    Mar 27, 2015 at 20:04
  • $\begingroup$ Bear in mind that sounds can mask one another. This is an effect of human perception of sound. However, people do not notice this as a rule, so I doubt it's an issue for you. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking $\endgroup$
    – user27118
    Mar 27, 2015 at 20:09

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You just add them. There is no reason to take an average.

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  • $\begingroup$ except, of course, to prevent clipping/overflow or any other reason you don't want the total energy to increase as much as it would by just adding. (but i up-arrowed the answer.) $\endgroup$
    – robert bristow-johnson
    Mar 27, 2015 at 20:50
  • $\begingroup$ and it probably should be migrated to dsp.se. $\endgroup$
    – robert bristow-johnson
    Mar 27, 2015 at 20:50
  • $\begingroup$ Reducing the amplitude to prevent clipping would change the loudness. $\endgroup$
    – TheBlackCat
    Mar 28, 2015 at 16:37
  • $\begingroup$ not (necessarily) the total loudness (that of A and B together). but yes, it would reduce the loudness of wave A. the point is that there are reasons (not "no reason") to average or to use AGC or level compression. $\endgroup$
    – robert bristow-johnson
    Mar 28, 2015 at 17:02

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