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<H1><A ID="SECTION001160000000000000000">
Artificial reverberation</A>
</H1>
<P>
Artificial reverberation is widely used to improve the sound of recordings, but
has a wide range of other musical applications [<A
HREF="node202.html#r-dodge85">DJ85</A>, pp.289-340].
Reverberation in real, natural spaces arises from a complicated pattern of
sound reflections off the walls and other objects that define the space. It is
a great oversimplification to imitate this process using recirculating,
discrete delay networks. Nonetheless, modeling reverberation using
recirculating delay lines can, with much work, be made to yield good results.
<P>
The central idea is to idealize any room (or other reverberant space) as a
collection of parallel delay lines that models the memory of the air inside the
room. At each point on the walls of the room, many straight-line paths
terminate, each carrying sound to that point; the sound then reflects into many
other paths, each one originating at that point, and leading eventually to some
other point on a wall.
<P>
Although the wall (and the air we passed through to get to the wall) absorbs
some of the sound, some portion of the incident power is reflected and makes
it to another wall. If most of the energy recirculates, the room reverberates
for a long time; if all of it does, the reverberation lasts forever. If at
any frequency the walls reflect more energy overall than they receive, the
sound will feed back unstably; this never happens in real rooms (conservation
of energy prevents it), but it can happen in an artificial reverberator if it
is not designed correctly.
<P>
To make an artificial reverberator using a delay network, we must
fill two competing demands simultaneously. First, the delay lines must
be long enough to prevent
<A ID="8091"></A><I>coloration</I> in the output as a result of comb filtering.
(Even if we move beyond the simple comb filter
of Section <A HREF="node109.html#sect7.recirculatingcomb">7.4</A>, the frequency response will tend to
have peaks and
valleys whose spacing varies inversely with total delay time.) On the other
hand, we should not hear individual echoes; the
<A ID="8094"></A><I>echo density</I> should ideally be at least one thousand per second.
<P>
In pursuit of these aims, we assemble some number of delay lines and
connect their outputs back to their inputs. The feedback path--the connection
from the outputs back to the inputs of the delays--should have an aggregate
gain that varies gently as a function of frequency, and never exceeds one for
any frequency. A good starting point is to give the feedback path a flat
frequency response and a gain slightly less than one; this is done using
rotation matrices.
<P>
Ideally this is all we should need to do, but in reality we will not always
want to use the thousands of delay lines it would take to model the paths
between every possible pair of points on the walls. In practice we
usually use between four and sixteen delay lines to model the room. This
simplification sometimes reduces the echo density below what we would wish,
so we might use more delay lines at the input of the recirculating network
to increase the density.
<P>
Figure <A HREF="#fig07.15">7.15</A> shows a simple reverberator design that uses this
principle. The incoming sound, shown as two separate signals in this example,
is first thickened by progressively delaying one of the two signals and then
intermixing them using a rotation matrix. At each stage the number of
echoes of the original signal is doubled; typically we would use between 6 and 8
stages to make between 64 and 256 echos, all with a total delay of between 30
and 80 milliseconds. The figure shows three such stages.
<P>
<DIV ALIGN="CENTER"><A ID="fig07.15"></A><A ID="8099"></A>
<TABLE>
<CAPTION ALIGN="BOTTOM"><STRONG>Figure 7.15:</STRONG>
Reverberator design using power-preserving transformations and
recirculating delays.</CAPTION>
<TR><TD><IMG
WIDTH="248" HEIGHT="453" BORDER="0"
SRC="img773.png"
ALT="\begin{figure}\psfig{file=figs/fig07.15.ps}\end{figure}"></TD></TR>
</TABLE>
</DIV>
<P>
Next comes the recirculating part of the reverberator. After the initial
thickening, the input signal is fed into a bank of parallel delay
lines, and their outputs are again mixed using a rotation matrix. The
mixed outputs are attenuated by a gain <IMG
WIDTH="40" HEIGHT="29" ALIGN="MIDDLE" BORDER="0"
SRC="img774.png"
ALT="$g \le 1$">, and fed back into the
delay lines to make a recirculating network.
<P>
The value <IMG
WIDTH="11" HEIGHT="29" ALIGN="MIDDLE" BORDER="0"
SRC="img29.png"
ALT="$g$"> controls
the reverberation time. If the average length of the recirculating delay lines
is <IMG
WIDTH="11" HEIGHT="14" ALIGN="BOTTOM" BORDER="0"
SRC="img28.png"
ALT="$d$">, then any incoming sound is attenuated by a factor of <IMG
WIDTH="11" HEIGHT="29" ALIGN="MIDDLE" BORDER="0"
SRC="img29.png"
ALT="$g$"> after a
time delay of <IMG
WIDTH="11" HEIGHT="14" ALIGN="BOTTOM" BORDER="0"
SRC="img28.png"
ALT="$d$">. After time <IMG
WIDTH="9" HEIGHT="13" ALIGN="BOTTOM" BORDER="0"
SRC="img82.png"
ALT="$t$"> the signal has recirculated <IMG
WIDTH="25" HEIGHT="32" ALIGN="MIDDLE" BORDER="0"
SRC="img775.png"
ALT="$t/d$"> times,
losing <!-- MATH
$20 {\log_{10}} (g)$
-->
<IMG
WIDTH="74" HEIGHT="32" ALIGN="MIDDLE" BORDER="0"
SRC="img776.png"
ALT="$20 {\log_{10}} (g)$"> decibels each time around, so the total gain, in
decibels, is:
<BR><P></P>
<DIV ALIGN="CENTER">
<!-- MATH
\begin{displaymath}
20 {t\over d} {\log_{10}} (g)
\end{displaymath}
-->
<IMG
WIDTH="80" HEIGHT="38" BORDER="0"
SRC="img777.png"
ALT="\begin{displaymath}
20 {t\over d} {\log_{10}} (g)
\end{displaymath}">
</DIV>
<BR CLEAR="ALL">
<P></P>
The usual measure of reverberation time (RT) is the time at which the gain drops
by sixty decibels:
<BR><P></P>
<DIV ALIGN="CENTER">
<!-- MATH
\begin{displaymath}
20 {\mathrm{RT}\over d} {\log_{10}}( g ) = -60
\end{displaymath}
-->
<IMG
WIDTH="144" HEIGHT="39" BORDER="0"
SRC="img778.png"
ALT="\begin{displaymath}
20 {\mathrm{RT}\over d} {\log_{10}}( g ) = -60
\end{displaymath}">
</DIV>
<BR CLEAR="ALL">
<P></P>
<BR><P></P>
<DIV ALIGN="CENTER">
<!-- MATH
\begin{displaymath}
\mathrm{RT} = {{-3d} \over {{\log_{10}}(g) }}
\end{displaymath}
-->
<IMG
WIDTH="100" HEIGHT="43" BORDER="0"
SRC="img779.png"
ALT="\begin{displaymath}
\mathrm{RT} = {{-3d} \over {{\log_{10}}(g) }}
\end{displaymath}">
</DIV>
<BR CLEAR="ALL">
<P></P>
If <IMG
WIDTH="11" HEIGHT="29" ALIGN="MIDDLE" BORDER="0"
SRC="img29.png"
ALT="$g$"> is one, this formula gives <IMG
WIDTH="19" HEIGHT="13" ALIGN="BOTTOM" BORDER="0"
SRC="img305.png"
ALT="$\infty$">, since the logarithm of one is zero.
<P>
The framework shown above is the basis for many modern reverberator designs.
Many extensions of this underlying design have been proposed. The most
important next step would be to introduce filters in the recirculation path so
that high frequencies can be made to decay more rapidly than low ones; this is
readily accomplished with a very simple low-pass filter, but we will not work
this out here, having not yet developed the needed filter theory.
<P>
In general, to use this framework to design a reverberator involves making many
complicated choices of delay times, gains, and filter coefficients. Mountains
of literature have been published on this topic; Barry Blesser has published a
good overview [<A
HREF="node202.html#r-blesser01">Ble01</A>]. Much more is known about reverberator design
and tuning that has not been published; precise designs are often kept secret
for commercial reasons. In general, the design process involves painstaking
and lengthy tuning by trial, error, and critical listening.
<P>
<BR><HR>
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<ADDRESS>
Miller Puckette
2006-12-30
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