Spatialization of Reverberant Reflections

While we did not go into the subject here, the early reflections should be spatialized by including a head-related transfer function (HRTF) on each tap of the early-reflection delay line [248].^4.21

Some kind of spatialization may be needed also for the late reverberation. A true diffuse field (§3.2.1) consists of a sum of plane waves traveling in all directions in 3D space. Since we do not know how to achieve this effect using current systems for reverberation, the typical goal is to simply extract uncorrelated outputs from the reverberation network and feed them to the various output channels, as discussed in §3.5. However, this is not ideal, since the resulting sound field consists of wavefronts arriving from each of the speakers, and it is possible for the reverberation to sound like it is emanating from discrete speaker locations. It may be that spatialization of some kind can better fool the ear into believing the late reverberation is coming from all directions.

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About the Author: Julius Orion Smith III
Julius Smith's background is in electrical engineering (BS Rice 1975, PhD Stanford 1983). He is presently Professor of Music and Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Electrical Engineering at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), teaching courses and pursuing research related to signal processing applied to music and audio systems. See http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/ for details.