Operations on sequences of numbers

In the last session we generated a sequence of numbers using the program coswave.m. Let's call the sample number i and the i'th sample x[i]:
 

i
x[i]
0
32000
1
30601
2
26529
3
20138
4
11987 
5
 2788
6
 -6654
7
 -15514
8
 -23019
9
 -28513
10
 -31514
11
 -31762
12
 -29234
13
 -24151
14
 -16958
15
 -8283
16
 1116
17
 10418
18
 18809
19
 25556
20
 30070
etc.

Some simple operations on lists of numbers:

1) Sum or integral, Σx[i]. If x[i] has positive and negative values, it is better to take the absolute (i.e. unsigned) value of x[i], written |x[i]|. The most common way of calculating this is to first calculate the square of x[i], x[i]2, and then take the square root, √x[i]2. This is a measure of the overall energy of a signal.

2) Obviously, x[i]2 gets bigger and bigger as x[i] gets longer. More usually, we are interested in the average amplitude of a signal, as calculated over n samples: √(Σx[i]2/n). This is called the root mean square or RMS amplitude, since it is the square root of the mean of the square of n samples.

An Octave program for calculating RMS amplitude is given here.

3) Local averaging ... (follow the link).