Intelligent Sound

Echo – In order to reproduce the outcome of echoes in a huge hall or grotto, one or even several overdue signals are added to the initial signal. To be professed as echo, the overdue must be of order 50 milliseconds or over. A bit under essentially playing a sound in the required environment, the outcome of echo may be implemented by using either analog or digital methods. Effects of analog echo are implemented by using spring reverbs and tape delays. When big numbers of overdue signals get mixed over several seconds, the resultant sound will have the effect of presenting it in a big room, and it is usually called an echo.

In music, the use of reverberation and echo effects goes back many centuries. Renaissance and Medieval holy music relied a lot on the composers' wide understanding and use of the composite natural echoes and reverberation inside churches. This early aural knowledge affected the design of concert halls and opera houses in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. In those times, structures were purposely built to produce internal reverberations to enhance sound from the stage as there was no electrical amplification back then.

Echo Chambers:

An echo chamber is any hollow space used to create echoing sounds, generally for purposes of recording. Suppose, the producer of a TV program may want to produce the acoustic false impression that a particular discussion is happening inside a cave; the required effect may be obtained by playing a recording of that particular conversation in an echo chamber, with an additional microphone to record the echoes.

Electronic echo machines:

In the 50s and 60s, the growth of magnetic audio tape technology made it easy to replicate reverberation effects and physical echo totally electronically. Renowned British electronics engineer Charlie Watkins designed and built The Watkins Copicat in the late 1950s. This device acts as a classic type of electronic delay device.

Digital echo:

With the arrival of digital signal processing and numerous other digital audio technologies, it became highly possible to imitate every echo chamber effect by digitalizing the processing of the signal. Because of these new technologies, physical echo chambers became useless. But, as mentioned above, the utilization of naturally reverberant enclosures like churches continues in classical forms of aural music.