RESEARCH — ACOUSTICS ALGORITHM
ARE
Active Room Engine
ARE lets you shape a room's acoustics in real time. Through a network of microphones and loudspeakers, a space can tune its reverberation — tighten it for clarity, extend it for music — or take on the measured acoustics of another room entirely. Acoustics become an adjustable property of the room: corrective when a space works against the programme, creative when the programme asks for more.
THE PROBLEM
A room's acoustic is fixed the day it is built
Every room imposes an acoustic. The reverberation that gives an orchestra its warmth blurs the spoken word; the control that keeps dialogue precise can leave music flat. A space is tuned — through its volume, its surfaces and its treatment — for one balance, and then asked to serve many.
Shaping that acoustic physically is effective but permanent. Absorption, diffusion and reflectors set a room's character once, at real cost in space and budget, and revising it means rebuilding — while a modern venue's programme can change from one hour to the next.
The opportunity is to make the acoustic itself adjustable: to correct a room that works against the material, and to design acoustics a building could never hold — treating reverberation, envelopment and clarity as parameters rather than fixed properties of the walls.
HOW IT WORKS
How it works
Tune the reverberation
Shorten the decay for speech and detail, or extend it for warmth and envelopment — the room's acoustic set precisely, not left to its surfaces.
Adopt another room's acoustic
Load the measured response of a concert hall, a chapel or a scoring stage, and the space takes it on — a design decision rather than a limit of the building.
Correct, or create
Fix a room that fights the material, or shape an acoustic no physical space could hold — the same engine serves the sound engineer and the acoustician.
UNDER THE HOOD
Going deeper
ARE treats the room as an active part of the acoustic chain. A distributed set of microphones senses the field, a loudspeaker network energises it, and the engine governs the exchange between them so the space presents the acoustic you specify — its natural response reshaped, not simply reinforced.
Three modes span correction and creation. Attenuate shortens the decay, adding effective absorption where a room is too live for speech. Amplify extends it, giving a modest space the presence of a larger one. Replace goes furthest: the natural response is held back and a measured acoustic — a concert hall, a chapel, a scoring stage — is presented in its place, so the room adopts a character by design.
Stability is the discipline of active acoustics: a microphone-and-loudspeaker system has to stay well clear of feedback to be usable at all. ARE draws on our feedback-suppression work to hold generous, natural-sounding gains at zero added latency — so the result reads as the room's own acoustic, not an effect laid over it.
AT A GLANCE
At a glance
| Input | Distributed microphones + loudspeakers |
| Modes | Attenuate · Amplify · Replace (virtual room) |
| Latency | Zero added — real-time loop |
| Scale | Up to 16 microphones × 64 loudspeakers |
| Availability | In development · OEM licensing |
PARAMETERS
Hands on the algorithm
| Reverberation | Shorten ↔ natural ↔ extend the decay |
| Mode | Attenuate · Amplify · Replace |
| Room library | Measured acoustic responses for Replace mode |
| Balance | Warmth, envelopment and clarity |
| Stability margin | Feedback-safety headroom |
| Presets | Per-event or per-scene recall |
POSITIONING
Compared to the alternatives
vs physical treatment
Absorption, diffusion and reflectors shape one acoustic permanently, at a cost in space and budget; ARE makes the same character adjustable and reversible, from one event to the next.
vs the established active-acoustics systems
Electroacoustic architecture has proven the idea in flagship halls at flagship budgets; ARE brings corrective and creative acoustic design to mid-size rooms, and licenses as source code for integrators to build on.
vs a reverb on the loudspeakers
A reverb across the PA colours only what passes through it; ARE reshapes the room's own field, so performers and audience share one coherent acoustic rather than a wet system over a dry room.
APPLICATIONS
Where it fits
Live & installed venues
Dry a reverberant hall for speech, open it up for music, or swap its acoustic between events — one room reconfigured electronically instead of rebuilt.
Studios & control rooms
Tighten a monitoring room's acoustic actively, or audition a mix inside the acoustics of another space — without moving a panel.
Automotive cabins
Active control inside the car — taming cabin resonance and reducing rolling and road noise for a quieter, more even listening space.
Domestic & untreated rooms
In a living room nobody can treat, ARE works alongside directional playback to tame the reflections an untreated space adds — cleaner sound without acoustic panels.
INTEGRATION
Built to live inside your product
| Delivery | C · C++ · MATLAB · .dsp — full source code |
| Platforms | macOS · Windows · Linux |
| DSP platforms | Flow DSP · Audio Weaver — solutions in preparation |
| Documentation | Technical documentation — under NDA |
OEM LICENSING
- ■ One-time payment per brand
- ■ Full source code — C, C++, MATLAB, .dsp
- ■ Technical documentation under NDA
- ■ Integration support included
- ■ Free updates
- ■ Volume discounts on multiple licenses
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