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An Interdisciplinary Synthesis of Reverberation Viewpoints

Artificial reverberator algorithms, which are implemented using digital signal processing, can be best understood by considering their relationships to several disciplines: the perceptual metrics of the auditory system, the statistical properties of the acoustic spaces, the artistic needs of the music culture, and the mixing techniques in the recording studio. Both the early reverberations, containing the unique spatial personality, and the late part, containing the statistically random process, play different roles in each of the related disciplines. When the temporal and spectral statistics match the perceptual criteria, the process is transparent. Some of the apparent paradoxes are resolved by considering psychoacoustic and statistical models. Moreover, there is sufficient knowledge to predict the performance of an algorithm without extensive ad hoc listening tests. The unifying theme is the question of how the human auditory system builds a sense of space.

Author: Blesser, Barry A.
Affiliation: Blesser Associates, Belmont, MA
JAES Volume 49 Issue 10 pp. 867-903; October 2001 Import into BibTeX

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