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Musikmesse 2010: Flux and IRCAM join forces

IRCAM Tools reverb and voice re-synthesizer launched

French software developers Flux and electro-acoustical research institute IRCAM were at the Musikmesse to announce a collaboration, the fruits of which are two really rather special plug-in processors that will soon be available for both PC and Mac, in VST, AU and RTAS formats.<strong>IRCAM Tools Spat</strong>

The first of these, called Spat, is a surround-sound-capable reverb, but one with a difference: rather than simply taking an input and generating a sense of space by sending algorithmically generated early reflections and reverb tails to the different speakers, it allows for multiple sound sources (up to eight) to each be placed in different areas of the same room, with the simulated reverb then being sent to speaker configurations ranging between stereo and 7.1 or 8.0 surround (up to a maximum of eight outputs).

But that’s not all. Each sound source can be made to ‘face’ in a different direction relative to the listening position, and this remarkably realistic effect is achieved using adjustable high- and low-pass filters for both the directional and omnidirectional dispersion characteristics, as well as a continuously adjustable directional dispersion angle. Your humble News Editor was at the 5.1-speaker demonstration in Frankfurt, and was most impressed by the plug-in’s ability to make a guitar track sound as though a guitarist was playing in the room, but with his back turned towards you.

In addition to the vast number of tweakable parameters for creating a highly plausible static reverb, Spat also synthesizes the Doppler effect, and when combined with automation (every one of the reverb’s parameters can be automated, by the way, including sound-source location), an extremely realistic sense of movement within a room can be created.

As with all of Flux’s plug-ins, two entirely independent lots of settings can be created within a single instance of the plug-in, and a slider at the bottom of the UI allows them to be seamlessly morphed between. Flux anticipate that this will be useful for television and film post-production, where a dubbing mixer may need to smoothly fade between two very different reverb types for two different scenes.

The full version of Spat should be available some time after May, and will cost 1674 Euros, including tax. If you’re not interested in the localisation and surround processing, but just want access to the reverb algorithm (which sounded incredibly smooth at the demonstration), you can get a cut-down, stereo-only version, called Verb, for 956 Euros.

<strong>IRCAM Tools Trax</strong>Of perhaps greater interest to the composer and project studio owner, however, was Trax Transformer. This nifty little plug-in, which Flux describe as a “real-time voice and sonic-modelling processor”, will take a vocal recording and change the singer’s age and gender with remarkable believability, even with extreme settings. Again, Flux believe this will have great value in the post-production world (the fantastic example given was to make Harrison Ford sound 20 years younger in the next Indiana Jones film!), but the demonstration showed the plug-in being used to make a male singer sound uncannily like a woman. Flux rather cruelly said that this could render thousands of female session singers redundant, as the voices of home- and project-studio knob-twiddlers could soon be instantly transformed to sound like highly paid divas. So you could soon be generating your own trio of backing singers (or even an entire choir!) without letting a single other soul anywhere near your mic collection.

The key to this plug-in’s success is that it processes the pitch elements of speech and vocals independently of the transients, so that hard consonant sounds go through the effect unscathed. The level of transient detection can be altered for the best results, and other adjustable parameters include Sinus (the voice’s nasal quality), Flat/Expression (which adjusts the amount of pitch variation), and Breathy, which, as far as I could hear, could just as well have been called the ‘Marilyn Monroe’ control!

Also available around the second half of this year, Trax Transformer will sell for just 478 Euros.

http://www.ircamtools.com

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