The paper “Shimmer Reverberation with Nonlinear Feedback Delay Networks” by Gloria Dal Santo, Xiaojie Pi, Karolina Prawda, Sebastian J. Schlecht and Vesa Välimäki received the Best Paper Award at the 29th International Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx26), which took place from 1 to 4 September 2026 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, USA. The work is a collaboration between the Aalto Acoustics Lab and the Artificial Audio Group at LMS, and shows how the shimmer effect popular in music production can be synthesized directly inside a feedback delay network: five variants of nonlinear and time-varying operations in the feedback loop expand the harmonic content while preserving energy conservation, stability, and controllable decay.
Best Paper Award at DAFX26
