Reverberation is an audible effect that is heard every day as a result of sound interacting with the environment around the listener. It is an effect that is commonly added artificially to electronically recorded and produced music, as well as in other media such as cinema, virtual reality applications and computer games. Auralization is an increasingly popular technique for accurately simulating reverberation and this website supports this practice through an expanding library of downloadable acoustic impulse responses (IRs) from interesting buildings, spaces and other sources. Some examples of the data found in the library can be seen in the slideshow to the right. Click on a photo to read more and listen to sounds in that space. Click on IR Data or use the map to browse the entire database. Upload your own sound and listen to it played back with the reverberation of any space found on the database. Please contact us if you have any comments or suggestions.
You can also find an expanding library of sounds recorded in an anechoic environment on this website. Click on Anechoic Data to browse this content, preview the sounds and download the data. You can preview the sounds either under anechoic conditions, or as if they were played in a space of your choice selected from the auralization database found on this site.
The Open AIR Library is supported by
We welcome contributions to the database from other interesting sources! If you would like to upload and share any impulse response data or anechoic sounds using this site, please register to the site and log in first. Then you can contribute data using an upload form, by clicking on the contribute menu item in either the auralization database page or the anechoic database page.