Over the past month, I received excellent feedback from classmates and music producers. Let’s group this into three categories: Existing plans to pursue further, new ideas to take into consideration, and changes to make based on feedback.

Existing Plans

  • As I mentioned in my Topic Selection post, I was researching algorithmic differences between plate, hall, and spring reverb plugins. People showed interest in other types of reverb, not just plate, so I’ll continue research on this front.
  • Building the physical plate reverb is still my main goal. It’s an interesting and practical demo idea!
  • People are interested in hearing the difference between reverb types, not just theory. I agree completely. Audio will be a major component of my final presentation.

New Ideas

  • My feedback partner mentioned the precedence effect. When a signal enters the ear, a sound occuring within about 50 ms (or some echo threshold) is perceived as a single event, with the spatial location being perceived as the location of the first sound.
  • I wrote about the effect in a previous article and decided it wasn’t particularly important.
  • The idea of using various sizes/materials to design my plate reverb came up, but it’d be a lot of effort. Designing one is time-consuming enough. However, I could build one and make it modifiable in some ways.

Changes

  • A friend pointed me toward Aether, an LV2 reverb plugin based on Cloudseed. It has some interesting settings and is well documented.
  • It’s not attempting to be realistic, so it won’t be as useful for understanding properties of physical reverb compared to analysing Dragonfly.
  • My analysis of the precedence effect got me interested in parameters like pre-delay. I’m not sure how I’d incorporate it into my final demonstration, though.