There are a number of solutions out there for removing reverb from existing audio. With most pitching themselves for a specific task, we try one of the latest AI tools with both speech and music.
Why Remove Reverb?
While adding reverb to recorded audio is a time-honoured technique in both music and post-production workflows, it’s only more recently that mixers have been afforded the ability to dry-up ambience in captured audio. The applications for this are many, but they broadly fall into one of two categories, these being aesthetic changes or objective improvement. Being able to make creative decisions about how much (if at all) to dry up signals for a music mix can be thought of largely as subjective. For other uses, such as on dialogue, processing can be used objectively to improve intelligibility, with the only decision being how much to use before artefacts appear or processing becomes too overt. In either case, reducing or removing reverb will have the effect of bringing the source forward in a mix allowing it to cut through other elements in order to give a bigger share of the listener’s attention. Certainly, for film and TV mixes, lack of dialogue clarity is a common viewer complaint, and any device to curtail this is valuable.
Allowing Or Avoiding Reverb
Sometimes nothing can beat the sound of real captured ambience when recording music, however anticipating the required amount of room sound and judging how far to pull the mics away takes skill, experimentation, or both. Even then there is no guarantee that things won’t change when it comes to the mix in any case. Speech capture is different of course, where aiming for the closest, driest possible pickup can be compromised by environmental factors such as room acoustics and the importance of staying out of shot.
Accentize DeRoom2 And DeRoom Pro2
Accentize, makers of AI-powered studio problem solvers such as de-noisers and auto-EQ tools have recently added extra functionality to the DeRoom and DeRoom Pro suite of drying-up tools with their recent 2.0.x upgrade. Although the plugin is intended primarily for speech duties, Accentize tell us that it can work for other sources as well, including drums. You can read more about the release in our article. Accentize says of their latest creation:
Reverb and Echo Suppression
ACCURATE SPEECH RESTORATION
All signal components which result from sub‑optimal recording conditions are automatically detected and removed. The de‑reverberation can significantly improve the perceived speech quality and intelligibility. No matter if recorded in an acoustically untreated recording room or even in a large church, DeRoom Pro will fix your recording.
Intelligent Processing
The DeRoom Pro algorithm automatically estimates the optimal room-size settings. During the training phase the neural network has listened to a great variety of different room conditions and can now automatically apply the required filtering.
Second Generation
The second generation of DeRoom Pro features an improved filtering algorithm which provides higher accuracy when detecting room reflections. Especially noticeable when using with recordings in larger rooms with long reverb tails.
Visualization
Choose between two different visualization modes to directly see how DeRoom Pro is affecting the signal. While the Waveform view shows the broadband energy, the Spectrogram view allows you to observe different frequency components.
In the video, we try DeRoom Pro2 on speech, and try out its musical chops on some transient and tonal sources as well.
Magic For The Masses?
With a tendency for specialist tools to be associated with either music or post, DeRoom and DeRoom Pro2 show us that ‘magic’ processing needn’t be restricted to objective problem solving. Using these tools creatively could be the final piece of the puzzle for some music mixes as well.