Design of Time-Varying Reverberators for Low Memory Applications

Tacksung CHOI
Young-Cheol PARK
Dae-Hee YOUN

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems   Vol.E91-D    No.2    pp.379-382
Publication Date: 2008/02/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1361
DOI: 10.1093/ietisy/e91-d.2.379
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: LETTER
Category: Music Information Processing
Keyword: 
all-pass filter,  reverberator,  time-varying,  

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Summary: 
Development of an artificial reverberator for low-memory requirements is an issue of importance in applications such as mobile multimedia devices. One possibility is to use an All-Pass Filter (APF), which is embedded in the feedback loop of the comb filter network. In this paper, we propose a reverberator employing time-varying APFs to increase the reverberation performance. By changing the gain of the APF, we can increase the number of frequency peaks perceptually. Thus, the resulting reverberation sounds much more natural, even with less memory, than the conventional approach. In this paper, we perform theoretical and perceptual analyses of artificial reverberators employing time-varying APF. Through the analyses, we derive the degree of phase variation of the APF that is perceptually acceptable. Based on the analyses, we propose a method of designing artificial reverberators associated with the time-varying APFs. Through subjective tests, it is shown that the proposed method is capable of providing perceptually comparable sound quality to the conventional methods even though it uses less memory.