Acoustic reflection related effects are present in many areas of music creation, production, and acoustics.
If you consider that we are in the need to create specific room to eliminate echoes, the anechoic rooms, to study sound more in details, that should clarify the omnipresence of these effects in our lives.
That is logical, since sound is an energy propagating in air which surrounds us, and it is quite inevitable that, after a source has emitted a sound, that sound would bounce off many obstacles and things it finds on its way to our ears.
For us, it is interesting to explore the many application of delays in sound-making, because they can extend the skill of a sound designer directly in the field of composition, but also in the textural and timbral modifications of sound.
In music
Canon AGE
The many delay effects could be recognised into imitation and repetition techniques. The major of this form was the canon which is a series of strict rules, a sort of musical puzzle, for which a melody should be followed by another identical after a gap of few measures, and have in its structure solutions for combining harmonically and melodically well when sounding together with the follower.
More freely also simple imitations are found in music so often that is impossible to make a detailed list. Think of Bach’s inventions for two voices, are the simplest example, in which imitation is at the base of the composition method.
Antiphonal music
As a reaction to physical sound delays in cathedrals, the antiphonal technique became very popular.
An example is the music of Gabrieli
A more complex version of music that relies on the reproduction of similar patterns has been found in AFRICAN…
The complexity of the resulting music has been analysed by music psychologist Bregman for the value these processes have in creating musical illusions, in particular highlighting peculiar phenomena in human perception of pitch and rhythm
Stev Reich’s music, in the minimalist age, explores the vicinity of sound, their repetition, as the method itself of the composition. ‘Come Out’ is the progressive delay of one audio channel played back over the second audio channel playing on time. Several phase cancellation effects are generated progressively and that
“Drummin’ is another example
In Audio Production
Mixing
Delay is used extensively in audio production
Reverberation techniques
The use of reverberation or giving ambience to a sound is very common nowadays, and
Sonic signature
Many bands of the past, and possibly nowadays still, have used delay effects to create a specific sound. Guitarists like Jimi Hendrix used extensively feedback techniques, David Evans (The Edge) of U2 made its sound with delay effects, Andy Summers of Police, or the band Television, Joy Division, Duran Duran too and many more.
in Acoustics
the two major techniques to analyse sound through reflection effects ae RT-60 measurement and Impulse Response