Download A Perceptually Inspired Single Parameter Auditory Distance Renderer for Music Production
Conveying auditory distance in a digital audio workstation requires balancing several uncoupled tools (reverb, gain, equalization, pre-delay) by hand, a workflow that is cognitively demanding and easily produces spatially incoherent results. We demonstrate a real-time VST3 plugin that derives five correlated distance cues from a single normalized control and keeps them mutually coherent by construction, grounded in the psychoacoustics of auditory distance perception. A headphone listening test with 18 participants showed that the coupled renderer roughly halves distance placement error relative to an uncoupled manual mix and was unanimously preferred on composite spatial quality. Users sweep one knob and hear sources move convincingly from near to far on multitrack material, compare the result against a manual uncoupled mix, and toggle an optional binaural externalization stage. Source code is available on GitHub.