Late-Reverberation Synthesis using Interleaved Velvet-Noise Sequences

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel algorithm for simulating the late part of room reverberation. A well-known fact is that a room impulse response sounds similar to exponentially decaying filtered noise some time after the beginning. The algorithm proposed here employs several velvet-noise sequences in parallel and combines them so that their non-zero samples never occur at the same time. Each velvet-noise sequence is driven by the same input signal but is filtered with its own feedback filter which has the same delay-line length as the velvet-noise sequence. The resulting response is sparse and consists of filtered noise that decays approximately exponentially with a given frequency-dependent reverberation time profile. We show via a formal listening test that four interleaved branches are sufficient to produce a smooth high-quality response. The outputs of the branches connected in different combinations produce decorrelated output signals for multichannel reproduction. The proposed method is compared with a state-of-the-art delay-based reverberation method and its advantages are pointed out. The computational load of the method is 60% smaller than that of a comparable existing method, the feedback delay network. The proposed method is well suited to the synthesis of diffuse late reverberation in audio and music production.