Frequency Domain Artificial Reverberation
using Spectral Magnitude Decay

AES Convention Paper 6926

Earl Vickers, The Sound Guy, Inc. - Seaside, CA, USA;
Jian-Lung (Larry) Wu, Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics - Stanford, CA, USA;
Praveen Gobichettipalayam Krishnan and Ravirala Narayana Karthik Sadanandam, University of Missouri - Rolla, MO, USA

A novel method of producing artificial reverberation in the frequency domain, using spectral magnitude decay, is presented. The method involves accumulating the magnitudes of the short-time Fourier transform, based on the desired decay time as a function of frequency. Compared to time domain methods such as feedback delay networks, the current method requires less memory and provides independent control of the reverberation energy and decay time in each frequency bin. The reduced memory requirements may be extremely advantageous for platforms with limited RAM, such as cell phones. Compared to convolution reverbs, the current approach offers flexible parametric control over the decay spectra and a computational cost that is independent of decay time.

Frequency Domain Artificial Reverberation using Spectral Magnitude Decay [article, .pdf]

Slide Show [.html]
(Note, the sound samples may not play on Macintosh, and in Windows you may have to click on them twice. The sound samples can be found in http://audioeffects.com/smd/smd_reverb_files/ .)

This work is also featured in the article "Reverberation and Dereverberation," Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, v. 55, No. 3, 2007 March, p. 189.

 

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