Automatic Adjustment of Off-the-Shelf Reverberation Effects

Virtually all effect units that process digital audio—software plug-ins as well as dedicated hardware—can be controlled digitally. This allows subjecting their settings to optimization processes. We demonstrate the automatic adaptation of reverberation plug-ins to given room impulse responses. This facilitates replacing computationally expensive convolution reverberation units with standard ones, which also are amenable to easier parameter tweaking after their overall setting has been adjusted through our method. We propose optimization strategies for this multidimensional non-linear problem that need no adaptation to the particularities of each effect unit, are sped up using multicore processors and networked computers. The optimization process evaluates the difference between the actual response and the targeted response on the basis of psychoacoustic features. An acoustic comparison with effect parameter settings crafted by professional human operators indicates that the computationally optimized settings yield comparable or better results.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• VST
• Optimizer
• Heise
• Hlatky
• Loviscach