Every engineer has heard it: a long reverb that starts fine and, a second into the tail, turns into a metallic tone, as if someone had struck a pipe. It is not a bad reverb. It is what any reverb built from delay lines does when nothing stops it.
Where the ring comes from
An algorithmic reverb is a network of delay lines feeding back into each other. Each line, on its own, is a comb filter: it reinforces the frequencies whose period divides its length and cancels the ones in between. A room does the same thing, but a room has thousands of reflection paths of every length, so the combs smear into a dense, neutral texture. A network has a few dozen lines at most. Their combs stay audible, and as the tail decays and the energy concentrates on the surviving resonances, the ring emerges. The more regular the network, the sooner it rings.
What modulation does, and what it costs
The standard cure is to modulate the delay lengths: an LFO slowly shortens and lengthens each line, so no resonance stays in one place long enough to build up. It works. It also has a price, because a delay line whose length changes is a pitch shifter. Modulate enough to kill the ring and the tail starts to wobble; sustained sources, a piano chord, a held vocal note, come out slightly seasick. Every reverb designer lives on that line between metallic and detuned, and the classic units are classics partly because of where they chose to sit on it.
The deeper problem is that an LFO is itself regular. It moves every line in a predictable way, and a predictable modulation leaves its own signature, just a slower one.
A tail moved by a flock
Murmuration replaces the LFO with a flock. Sixty-four delay lines, one per bird, and each bird follows the three rules of a real murmuration: stay close, stay aligned, do not collide. The flock never repeats and never settles, so no line ever stays in a resonance. The lines do shift in pitch, and deliberately so, but each one rides a different bird along its own axis, so the shifts never line up. What you hear is the tail thickening and spreading, not the single coherent wobble an LFO leaves behind. The birds' horizontal positions pan the lines, which is why the stereo image drifts with the flock instead of staying nailed.
Below are three rooms on a drum loop. The interface is the plugin, rendered offline in sync with the sound; the flock you see is the one moving the tail you hear. MIX is the plugin's own knob, from the bare source to the tail alone: push it to 100 % on the plate and listen for the metallic ring that gives plate emulations away. It is not there.