Reverbs

In nature, reverb is observed mostly within enclosed spaces, such as rooms. Reverbs are easier to understand if we imagine an impulse sound, like a hand clap, emitted from a sound source in an empty room. Such a sound will propagate in a spherical fashion and for simplicity we should regard it as traveling in all directions. The emitted sound will travel in a direct path to a listener (or a microphone) followed by reflections that bounced from the walls, floor and ceiling. These will be gradually followed by denser reflections that have bounced many times from many surfaces. As sound both diminishes when traveling through air and being absorbed by surface materials, the reflections will slowly decay in amplitude. Reverb is the collective name given to the sound created by bounced reflections from room boundaries (which we consider to be the main reverb contributors, although in a room there might be many surfaces). In mixing, we use reverb emulators, either hardware units or software plugins, to simulate this natural phenomenon.