A Reverberation Instrument Based on Perceptual Mapping

The present article describes a reverberation instrumentwhich is based on cognitive categorization of reverberating spaces. Different techniques for artificial reverberationwill be covered. A multidimensional scaling experimentwas conducted on impulse responses in order to determinehow humans acoustically perceive spatiality. This researchseems to indicate that the perceptual dimensions are related to early energy decay and timbral qualities. Theseresults are applied to a reverberation instrument based ondelay lines. It can be contended that such an instrumentcan be controlled more intuitively than other delay line reverberation tools which often provide a confusing range ofparameters which have a physical rather than perceptualmeaning.