FDverb: A Frequency-Domain Artificial Reverberator
FDverb is a frequency-domain artificial reverberation plug-in developed by the IIP Group. The plug-in synthesizes reverberation from a spectrally shaped noise carrier, which enables both natural-sounding tails and effects with no physical counterpart.
FDverb builds on the idea of a vocoder driven by a noise carrier. Rather than simulating the acoustics of a physical space, it synthesizes reverberation from a noise carrier whose spectrum is shaped by the input signal. This approach is motivated by the observation that the late part of a room impulse response closely resembles exponentially decaying noise, making an envelope-shaped noise carrier a natural and computationally efficient basis for reverberation.
FDverb combines an early-reflection unit based on sparse time-domain convolution with a frequency-domain tail reverberator. The tail reverberator tracks short-time spectral envelopes, shapes a noise-carrier spectrum accordingly, and reconstructs the late reverberation by inverse transformation.
Beyond realistic room simulation, FDverb offers a range of creative controls that have no acoustic counterpart. These include gated and nonlinear decay modes, an infinitely sustained freeze, pitch shifting and gradual pitch drift, a brick-wall equalizer that restricts the reverberation to a selected frequency band, and stereo-width controls.