What is the Hamming window for?

Question

I\'m working with some code that does a Fourier transform (to calculate the cepstrum of an audio sample). Before it computes the Fourier transform, it applies a Hamming window t

Answer 1

Whenever you do a finite Fourier transform, you're implicitly applying it to an infinitely repeating signal. So, for instance, if the start and end of your finite sample don't match then that will look just like a discontinuity in the signal, and show up as lots of high-frequency nonsense in the Fourier transform, which you don't really want. And if your sample happens to be a beautiful sinusoid but an integer number of periods don't happen to fit exactly into the finite sample, your FT will show appreciable energy in all sorts of places nowhere near the real frequency. You don't want any of that.

Windowing the data makes sure that the ends match up while keeping everything reasonably smooth; this greatly reduces the sort of "spectral leakage" described in the previous paragraph.