I was reading the documentation of cwt (1D continuous wavelet transform) in matlab and came across this sentence cwt uses 10 voices per octave. My question is what does voices per octave means?
The reason v is referred to as the number of voices per octave is because increasing the scale by an octave (a doubling) requires v intermediate scales. Take for example 2v/v=2 and then increase the numerator in the exponent until you reach 4, the next octave. You move from =2 to =4. There are v intermediate steps. Common values for v are 10,12,14,16, and 32. The larger the value of v, the finer the discretization of the scale parameter, s. However, this also increases the amount of computation required because the CWT must be computed for every scale. The difference between scales on a log2 scale is 1/v.