DSP specialist Geraint from Signalsmith Audio explains how he built the Utopia reverb plugin for ADPTR Audio. Instead of copying a real room or using simple echoes, Utopia creates smooth layers of sound that keep evolving over time. Sounds are divided into small slivers throughout the frequency spectrum, allowing users to apply spectral processing. For example, it's possible to adjust the decay time of low and high-frequency content separately.

Geraint discovered his passion for music, programming, and math at a young age. As a child, he took piano lessons and learned to code in QBasic on his dad’s Windows 95 PC. When he applied math to solve coding challenges, he found that the same formulas could create sound, which sparked his interest in digital signal processing.

He starts each new effect by sketching ideas on paper and writing down the underlying algorithms. Next, he translates those algorithms into code and runs early versions to assess their performance. By listening closely and tweaking settings, he refines the code until the plugin becomes a musical tool.