Quantifying Fuzz

[Triffid]

Ok, this may sound really weird and ridiculous, but I'll throw it out there anyway...

First of all.. bare with I am kind of new to this stuff....

A recent thread topic (Measuring Fuzz) got me thinking about a way to quantify an effect... in particular, fuzz.  Given a static input signal, could the modified sine wave somehow be uniquely quantified (in a simple way).  For example... frequency * amplitude * etc, etc, etc...  Maybe sampled or some set time or some number of iterations.  This number would have to have some sort of order to it, so that waves that look similar will have numbers close in value.  Then we could compare these numbers to see how much the effects sound alike, etc...

Ok... now you can tell me how dumb I am ...

[Mike Burgundy]

Well, one can measure distortion % and do a fourier analysys to get harmonic content, but while interesting it's still far from a statement on how the thing actually *sounds*
You can experiment with recorded WAVs, there's some fourier analysis programs around.

[Triffid]

I am assuming that if all other things (beside the effect) are equal, and both effects produce the same wave, then the sound will come out identical.  I hope this is a safe assumption.  If so, then the root of the question is just... what is the best way to compare the waves?   Then you can come up with a percentage match between the waves.  All this would just let us be cool when we say our FF clone is a 99.9% match with the FF that Hendrix used.  Of course... you would need to get your hands on a FF that Hendrix used to test it... unless you can somehow strip out only the FF effect from a Hendrix recording... but thats a different thread