Analysis and Design Algorithm of Time Varying Reverberator for Low Memory Applications

Development of an artificial reverberation algorithm with low memory requirements has been an issue of importance in applications such as mobile multimedia devices. One possible solution to this problem is to embed a time-varying all-pass filter to the feedback loop of the comb filter. In this paper, theoretical and perceptual analyses of reverberators embedding time-varying all-pass filters in their feedback loops are presented. The analyses are to find a perceptually acceptable degree of phase variation by the all-pass filter. Based on the analyses, we propose a new methodology of designing reverberators embedding time-varying all-pass filters. Through the subjective tests, we showed that, even with smaller memory, the proposed method is capable of providing perceptually superior sound to the previous methods involving time-invariant parameters.