Nerd Alert: Velvet Reverbs

In 2013 some clever folks at a Finnish University developed a new way to calculate a type of randomness which works particularly well at simulating what we perceive as ‘reverb’, or the reflections of sounds from objects and surfaces in the space around us. It was looked at by various academics over the years (and possibly used in audio DSP ‘behind-the-scenes’) until Phonolyth released Velvet Machine in 2021.

As far as I know, that was the first commercial reverb to utilise velvet noise.

Earlier this year apulSoft released apVerb which also uses the velvet noise technique, but has added a powerful multi-breakpoint envelope layer which gives us incredible control over the velvet reverb functions turning it into some weird beast which sits between reverb and multi-tap delays.

And then a month or so ago, Amalgamated Machines released Nepenthe, totally free (but you should donate if you use it!) which uses velvet noise to create a strange, ethereal space for your sounds to sit in.

And that’s it! There are no more velvet noise reverbs at the moment (the tail end of 2023) on the market. I hope some devs are finding new ways to implement it, add functionality which makes those users who want more controls, happy :)

In the meantime, here’s short-ish video about ‘it’ as a principle, with a little bit of reverb-ucation to help understand where velvet noise sits in the already overwhelming, and bloated, world of software reverb plugins.