Methods for Procedural Design of Spatial Reverb by John Burnett and Benoit Alary
For the 2025 IRCAM Forum, we are proposing both a lecture and a demo session which will explore procedural design methods for spatial reverberation in artistic creation. The presentation will center around two recent technologies from the IRCAM EAC group: the Elliptique reverb and the Elliptique Viewer, a new visualization and control interface. Using these tools, the presentation will establish a language for working with and sculpting spatial reverberation and examine the application of these ideas in the context of multichannel audio and ambisonic spatialization. The main focus of this presentation is on visualization as well as various means of procedurally generating reverberation profiles using the Elliptique Viewer. One such method is via a room model with various real-time parameters such as room dimensions and wall absorption. The viewer also allows for more abstract methods of generation, such as using 3D spatial noise to distribute decay profiles around the listener. Special attention will also be payed to means of transforming the sound field over time, giving the impression of a room with shifting dimensions or reverberant spaces with impossible geometries and acoustic properties. We intend to accompany the lecture with a demonstration of various design approaches and procedural generation methods within a multichannel speaker array.
