The adaptive noise canceller (ANC) is a commonly used linear system method for noise reduction in cases where the disturbing noise can be separately recorded (reference signal) and is not correlated with the signal of interest. In case of a periodic disturbing signal, special solutions are described in literature. Problems, however, arise when the propagation of the noise from the source to the recording sensors passes nonlinear structures. An ANC modification proposed for this case by Strobach and applied by several other researchers, thus, uses an artificial reference signal, based on event triggered averaging of segments of the recorded wanted (but disturbed) signal in order to obtain a template for the repetitive distortion sequence and to construct the artificial reference signal. The effect of the averaging and the error introduced by this approximation of the real disturbing signal was not addressed in literature until now, thus, this paper presents some basic theoretical considerations on this topic. Methods are demonstrated in simulations and real biosignal processing, and application aspects are discussed