A Digital Reverberator Controlled through Measures of the Reverberation

A simple but efficient stereo reverberation control is developed to simulate reverberation. Inspired from previous classic studies, the reverberator is built using simple digital filters, including comb filters and all-pass filters commonly used for digitally simulating reverberation. The digital reverberator incorporates low-pass filters to simulate the air and walls absorption effect, gains to control the wet/dry effect and a delay difference parameter to introduce a difference between the channels. A total of 21 digital parameters define the whole reverberation control. Five measures commonly used to characterize reverberation are defined from the impulse response, and formulae are derived to estimate values of these reverberation measures in terms of the digital parameters for the reverberator. Dependence relations between the digital parameters lead to the need of only five independent parameters to control the whole reverberator, so that the measures can be redefined as five functions of five independent parameters. This mapping parameters-measures is used to let the reverberator to be controlled through the measures of the reverberation, in other words the reverberator can generate a reverberation effect based on desired characteristics of the reverberation itself. This work was supported by NSF grant number IIS-0757544.