Michail Protopapadakis | 2025 I.S Symposium

Name: Michail Protopapadakis
Title: Material Girl in a Material World: Exploring the Material Agency of Human Skeletal Remains from Pella, Jordan
Major: Archaeology, Environmental Geoscience
Advisors: Lisa Monetti, Greg Wiles

Artificial reverberation is a method of adding “echo” to a particular sound to achieve a desired effect. In doing so, a signal with a short impulse can sound as if it is played from a large reverberant space, such as a concert hall. Common C++ implementations of this effect usually fall under two different categories: the first using purely artificial means, and the second mimicking a provided impulse response. The former creates this effect via a number of delay lines in parallel, resulting in a reverberated sound provided a sufficiently high echo density is created. The latter uses the impulse response of an acoustic space to generate a realistic sounding reverb, which is added to the input signal. This thesis studies the practical and sonic differences between these algorithms and their implementations. This includes the recording and processing of impulse responses in an acoustic space. The final program will allow producers to use either one of these algorithms independently in the Digital Audio Workstation of their choice.

I am personally excited about the combination of Music and Computer Science in this thesis. I have personally used many applications that directly use the theory I learned about digital audio in DAWs. It is fulfilling to have created something in this niche that many may take for granted.

Posted in Symposium 2025 on May 1, 2025.