CAVIAR Cave of Augmented Virtual and Interactive Audio Realities Through the use of virtual acoustic technologies we can radically alter the reverberant conditions of any room. Users hear the sounds they make in a space other than the expected acoustic of the physical room they occupy. The CAVIAR system creates its simulations through a combination of feedback canceling technology (somewhat like the noise cancellation systems used in headphones, but better) and convolution reverberation. To create a convolution reverberation we go to a space and we record ourselves popping a balloon in it. The recording of this balloon pop tells us how the space reacts to sounds that are made there, ie. what the reverberation quality, the acoustic signature of the space, actually is. With CAVIAR we can then multiple the spectrum of the balloon pop with any input sound — this other sound now appears to have been made in the space in which the balloon was popped. It is also possible to create imaginary spaces — space that can not exist in the real world — but that’s for another day!* CAVIAR is capable of being scaled for use with any number of speakers and microphone, the systems you will hear today use 2 microphones and 4 speakers.
For further technical details please see:
Abel, J. S., Callery, E. F., and Canfield-Dafilou, E. K., “A Feedback Canceling Reverberator,” in Proceedings of the Digital Audio Effects Conference, Aveiro, 2018.
E. K. Canfield-Dafilou, E. F. Callery, J. S. Abel, and J. Berger, “A method for studying interactions between music performance and rooms with real-time virtual acoustics,” in Proceedings of the 146th Audio Engineering Society Convention, Dublin, 2019.
E. F. Callery, J.S Abel, and K.S.Spratt, “Synthesizing Reverberation Impulse Responses from Audio Signals: Auto-Reverberation and Interactive Environments”, in Proceedings of the 151th Audio Engineering Society Convention, Las Vegas 2021.