Music Engineering, 2nd Edition

6

Wild Thing – Electronic effects

Echo and reverberation

A true echo is only heard when a reflected sound arrives a twentieth of a second or more after the direct sound first reaches our ears. Compare that sound with the sound that accompanies the voice of a priest or of a choir as their effusions stir the roar of reverberation in the atmosphere of a vast, medieval cathedral. This reverberation is made up of echoes too, but by a mass of echoes following more swiftly than those of a discrete echo. In fact, reverberation has several, distinct phases as illustrated in Figure 6.1. The delay between the original sound and the first reflection is known as the pre-delay, there follows several distinct reflections which gradually fuse into a more-or-less ...