Reverb and space: convolution, distance, and 3D audio

Every sound you synthesize is born dry — a signal with no room around it. In a live-coded set, whether it lands on the audience’s headphones or a club PA, what sells it is placement: a pad that sits far behind the kick, a texture that circles the head, a snare that snaps in a huge-but-truncated space. This module builds one whole skill: taking a dry mono source and putting it somewhere, convincingly, three different ways.

The arc starts supported. First exercise: load an impulse response and convolve a dry clap with it, leaning on the ideas that convolution applies an impulse response to a signal and that convolving a sound with a space’s IR places it acoustically in that space — with the time–frequency duality of convolution explaining why FFT-based engines make this cheap enough for live use. Next you work depth with a plain reverb, drilling the wet/dry-controls-distance cue until pushing a sound back is reflexive. Then the 3D leg: how interaural time, level, and spectral cues let humans localise sound motivates HRTFs, and the ATK’s encode → transform → decode workflow becomes the how-to spine — FoaPanB for a modulatable moving pan, a binaural kernel decoder for headphone monitoring.

The required atoms are exactly the capstone’s dependency chain: no convolution stage without the IR concepts, no moving Ambisonic pan without B-format, the ATK pipeline, and the panning UGen. Supporting atoms widen the craft — critical distance and gated reverb for genre-aware reverb decisions, azimuth conventions and speaker routing for the day you graduate from headphones to a real multichannel rig, the FOA-vs-HOA toolset distinction, higher-order Ambisonics, A-format, and per-grain spatialization as onward paths. The capstone is done unsupported: dry source in, three convincing spaces out.

Runnable examples

Generated from the context/ instrument corpus by concept (redistributable idioms only). Do not edit — regenerate with gen-module-examples.mjs.

reverb-space

s("cp").room(0.6).size(4)

_{strudel-0019 · CC0}

out: mix ~a ~b >> plate 0.3

_{glicol-0008 · MIT}