Moderate reverberation added to music gives us a sense of listening indoors.
We tend to perceive small rooms as being calmer, safer, and more pleasant than large spaces. Evidence suggests that the size of a room, sensed through audio cues such as reverberation, affects our emotional response to neutral and nice sounds. One thing our brain senses from reverberation is the geometry of the room where music is being played. The study by Bidelman and Krishnan confirms what you might have heard, the added reverberation might improve the quality of the poor singer’s voice, but it does nothing for the tuning. On television programs where people with lousy voices attempt to sing, as soon as the person hits the first note you can hear the audio engineers slathering on reverberation to rescue the sound. Within music, this would indicate that the perceived timbre of the notes would change but not the pitch. They found that reverberation had little effect on the neural encoding of pitch while significantly degrading the neural encoding of formant-related harmonics. Would a scientific study find an innate preference for reverberation? Or is reverberation something we just learn to like through experience?Ī study by Bidelman and Krishnan investigated the response in the brainstem to a vowel sound, and how this was changed with moderate reverberation. For example, humans innately prefer certain combinations of notes, although this preference can be altered by the music we hear during our lives.
What it is about reverberation that has made it so important to music for thousands of years? Scientific studies have looked at our preferences for other musical characteristics.
Archaeoacoustic experts argue that the reverberation created by ancient monuments such as Stonehenge or within caves were used by our ancestors to enhance rituals. Natural reverberation also plays a vital role in classical music, with concert halls being carefully designed so the brief lingering of sound in the hall embellishes the orchestra’s sound. Since then, “reverb” has become a ubiquitous part of the music producer’s tool kit. This 1947 number one hit “Peg o’ My Heart” by Jerry Murad’s Harmonicats, was the first recording to use reverberation artistically.
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