The Switched Convolution Reverberator

An artificial reverberator having low memory and small computational cost, appropriate for mobile devices, is presented. The reverberator consists of an equalized comb filter driving a convolution with a short noise sequence. The reverberator equalization and decay rate are controlled by low-order IIR filters, and the echo density is that of the noise sequence. While this structure is efficient and readily generates high echo densities, if a fixed noise sequence is used, the reverberator has an unwanted periodicity at the comb filter delay length. To overcome this difficulty, the noise sequence is regularly updated or “switched”. Several structures for updating the noise sequence, including a leaky integrator sensitive to the signal crest factor, and a multi-band architecture, are described.