Video: How reverb makes Christmas carols sing
From concert-hall designers to pop record producers, everyone in the music industry knows we love reverb. But why?
THE TALL, arched, windowless space has just enough light for me to make out the explicit frescoes of naked bodies and skeletons adorning its walls. But I’m not here in the suburbs of Oslo for the visuals. For people in my line of work, the (photo below) is most famous for its stunning acoustics.
I burst a balloon, and the bang takes 15 seconds to die away. I sing a note, and another and another, and they hang in the air together as a chord. The effect is spine-tingling. And although this is an extreme example, it illustrates a near-universal truth: we love our sounds with a bit of reverb.
This is, on the face of it, rather odd. Reverberation replaces the clear, unadulterated sounds of our own voices or instruments with something acoustically far more messy. Other musical preferences, such as why we choose consonance over dissonance, are well researched, but the question of why reverb is such an essential part of our musical experience has largely been met with silence. Time to make some noise.
(Image: Emanuel Vigeland Museum/Bono)
A first whisper of an explanation comes in the acoustic antithesis of Vigeland’s mausoleum: the in my lab at the University of Salford, UK. This is a sonically dead space, where every surface is covered with wedges of sound-absorbing foam. Playing my saxophone there isn’t a pleasant experience. Without sound bouncing back off the…
