Freesound Forums

I've been thinking about creating impulse responses, but how do I create them? A basic howto would be helpful.

Hi. What you will need are flat microphones and speakers and a convolution plug-in with a deconvolution option. Basically you set up your equipment, a speaker and the means to play a sine sweep and a microphone and the means to record the sweep echoing through the room. Then what you do is recover the impulse response using the deconvolver bit. Voxengo does a deconvolver I believe and Sound Forge's Acoustic Mirror has one built in. Basically you get the deconvolver to compare the dry sine sweep with the recorded one and it'll extrapolate the room's impulse response for you.

This is the best way to do it though a simpler way is to get something like a starter pistol, fire it in the space you want to record, cut off the spike at the front and save the echo as your IR. The sine sweep method is superior though.

Hope this helps.

Hi jobro,

ARTA http://www.fesb.hr/~mateljan/arta/index.htm is a set of programs designed to do exactly what you are asking using your computer sound card. ARTA is widely used in the Pro Audio business and is highly regarded. It's free-ware but will not save the results to Disc unless you register it for around 70 Euros, or 70 Pounds sterling.

Either way, the PDF manuals and documents on the "download" page, which are free, are an excellent source of information, covering both practice and theory in clear but precise detail. In fact a browse though the ARTA web site is an education in audio measurement and analysis.

Hope this what you are looking for,
Wibby.

Also, if you are looking more to make IR's of equipment you could check out Image-Line's new Convolution plugin (I think its FLStudio 9.1 native only at the moment though, though should be able to save out the IR's from the FLS demo for use in other programmes).