Awareness of these possibilities of viewing a signal and their constraints, and knowing how they actually work, will greatly increase our productivity. So let's get to actually synthesizing some waveforms. A good example of different views of a signal operation is Amplitude Modulation (AM); we will also try to formulate some other general principles using the example of AM.
AM means the multiplication of a signal with an oscillator. This provides a method of generating sidebands, which is partial in a very easy, intuitive, and CPU-efficient way. Amplitude modulation seems like a word that has a very broad meaning and can be used as soon as we change a signal's amplitude by another signal. While this might be true, in the context of audio synthesis, it very specifically means the multiplication of two (most often sine) oscillators. Moreover, there is a distinction between AM and Ring Modulation. But before we get to this distinction, let's look at the following...