I'm attempting to emulate something in PD that calls for a 4 pole Butterworth low pass filter with a cutoff frequency of 10 Hz. I have very little idea what that is. But I'm wondering if it's possible to construct something that would do the same thing in PD. If so, anyone have any ideas on how to make something like that with PD's existing objects?
Try this filter designer to get coefficients to use in biquad~ objects: http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~fisher/mkfilter/trad.html
Here's some code too, which might be more clear: http://www.musicdsp.org/showone.php?id=227
For 4-pole you'll need to use more than one biquad, I think. I'm not sure how, but you can split it over multiple biquads.
Start with 2-pole for a single biquad, to make things easy.
Steve