Meteora

Why a landscape

Most reverbs give you a room. Meteora gives you a valley: conglomerate pillars rising hundreds of meters, monasteries on their summits, a village at their foot. Sound travels far there and comes back late, from many directions, and the air between decides how bright it returns. The plugin lets you place a source and two microphones anywhere in that landscape and hear it answer.

From open data to an echo

The terrain comes from Copernicus satellite elevation at 30 m, too coarse for the pillars’ walls, so they are sharpened using OpenStreetMap cliff lines and summit heights, and every change is logged. An offline Python pipeline turns that into a 5 m terrain, about 57,000 acoustic surface patches and a pack the plugin loads. In the plugin, first order echoes are computed for each microphone’s exact position, later reflections are traced on a worker and become a convolution tail, and the audio thread only plays delay taps and that tail. Every sound carries the tag “simulated from open data, uncalibrated”.

A reverb that listens

Version 0.3 adds a listener that hears attacks, density, brightness, pitch and noisiness, and a guide that turns them into suggestions or changes: dense playing can bring the place close, bright playing can change the air. It never writes host automation, and whenever it moves the landscape beyond the physics, an EXTREME lamp says so.

Released for ADC

Meteora 0.3 was released on November 6, 2026 as a free download for the Audio Developer Conference in Bristol, shared with attendees by QR code. Notarization, an AU for Logic and a Windows build are the road to 1.0.