I'd say it's definitely at Art, notwithstanding the hard engineering skills needed to accomplish it.
In any task, ask yourself where the skilled human work is located. The work in this case is _listening_. A great reverb has to work with a wide range of instruments, to flatter the different transients, sustained timbres and spectral morphologies of performance. That can mean hours of tweaking values and careful aesthetic evaluation. Of course there are shortcuts and powerful tools to employ. These days we can go from impulse responses to geometric topologies and then to parametric models ... but there's still work in selecting rooms to sample, and selecting what features of that space are of interest... that's hard aesthetic work. Following my colleague Nikolay Georgiev was an eye opener; the way he researches spaces, abandoned mines, remote cathedrals in Eastern Europe.. the work that goes into this is comparable with a film location director, including a detailed knowledge of materials science, architecture. Not to mention the travel costs and hazardous recording adventures. And those impulses are just the raw materials for the algorithms he then uses to create plugins. Sometimes you get lucky with a mathematical insight - like the Fibonacci reverbs I stumbled upon many years ago... but most of it is bloody hard work comparable with any serious sound design... so I would not uner-rate it. A problem that we face in technological arts is that work is devalued by "managerial types", for whom technology is a kind of disposable magic - being surrounded every day by miraculous accomplishments built on the shoulders of giants engenders a cavalier nonchalance for skills which are the products of decades of study and experience. So called "AI" is only going to make this worse. As Martin says, the goals are everything... why bother to create a reverb by careful design when you can shove a few random prime numbers into a delay lattice and 99% of people won;t notice the difference? good health to you all, Andy On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 10:10:51AM +0200, Martin Lind wrote: > The amount of developing time for a reverb algorithm is very much depended > on the goals and target for that particular algorithm. If you want to make a > high-end classic and start from scratch then it takes way more time than > contract work. > > VSS series from TC Electronic took 8 engineers almost 10 years to finish. > Bricasti (Casey) use at least 4-5+ years for a single algorithm. > Lexicon (David Griesinger) worked 3 years on the HD algorithm. > And so on. > > The above is obviously flagship products and not contract work. And none of > them use FDN in the traditional sense. > > > -----Original Message----- > From: music-dsp-boun...@music.columbia.edu > [mailto:music-dsp-boun...@music.columbia.edu] On Behalf Of gm > Sent: 21. maj 2020 23:04 > To: music-dsp@music.columbia.edu > Subject: [music-dsp] the time it takes to design a reverberator and related > > > I need some possibly quotable real world opinions and experiences on how > long stuff > can take to design or develop, especially takeing Hofstadter's Law into > account > > For instance reverberators, hard to estimate, and I dont recall all the > times I spent exactly > I tried so many things on different occasions so long ago, improved > things, disimproved them > but my estimate is that it takes many months experience (at least) and > experimenting to come > to good and really good results. > Especially if you start with FDNs first and waste a long time on them... > If you have experience and start from scratch it takes days or weeks to > refine your design. > > You may however have at some point developed prototypes that you can > reuse and modify and do not change too much any more. > > Two years ago or so I posted a kind of non-paper here on "magic numbers > in reverb design" where I claimed > having found a "perfect" ratio for allpass delay stage lengths. I could > never decide if its kind of nonsense or not since > the method gives quite good results, but I think I used other numbers > afterwards myself IIRC. I am not even sure at the moment... > > Does anybody recall that paper and did anybody ever try and remember the > results? > Did it speed developement up for you? Did it make any sense to you at > all (its written in a weird way)? > > Would you call a good reverb algorithm a piece of art? > > Since the process can take so eratically long, and since you can go back > and forth many times, > what do you think a reasonable time estimate would be? How much time > would you charge for that reverb, reasonably? > > How and when do you decide it's finished and that you don't change > parameters any more? > > How many times and for how long did you try to make "the most efficient > reverberator you can get away with"? > Did you ever succeed in that quest? > > Do you think there is something like a "most reasonable" reverb design? > > > > _______________________________________________ > dupswapdrop: music-dsp mailing list > music-dsp@music.columbia.edu > https://lists.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/music-dsp > > _______________________________________________ > dupswapdrop: music-dsp mailing list > music-dsp@music.columbia.edu > https://lists.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/music-dsp
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