For The Aquatic Museum app, I use the FMOD audio middleware combined with the Unity Game Engine. While this research is not about the technical aspects, it is important to give an overview in the methodology section of the tools used in my creative process. I use the same tools in my advanced teaching skills research by taking advantage of software resembling traditional DAWs but designed for video games. However, differences from traditional audio workstations do appear in the media creation process. This research also focuses on one specific element or feature used in adaptive audio and other music creation tools: randomness or aleatory features.
Composing music for games requires a different approach from the more linear thinking used in film music.
For the FMOD creators, their studio package is
“an end-to-end solution for adding sound and music to any game. Build adaptive audio using the FMOD Studio and play it in-game using the FMOD Engine.”1
Three market segments are listed: sound designers, programmers, and producers. The idea is to facilitate the video game audio and music creation process and task assignments between audio designers and coders.
Excellent tutorials can be found on YouTube2, and for book recommendations, please refer to the Game Music and Audio Book References section. The simplest entry into the technical aspects comes from a personal example from a 2021 global game jam in Luxembourg. The setting is a spaceship—yes, exactly as you’d imagine one: dark, damp, menacing, and claustrophobia-inducing. Furthermore, dear reader, note how stressful the absence of a stop button is. The ship’s soundscape was created with different sound samples, some of them hand-recorded with voice, paper, and tube accessories.
Here is the video of the actual simple project in FMOD Studio, the main design tool of the suite. Two important things to note: first, I’m not using the timeline in this example.3 The slider triggers different sound objects called instruments in FMOD when moved by the user or triggered by code, and some audio samples are triggered asynchronously. Automation lanes, shown at the end of the clip, control volume as well as the parameters of the different instruments.
The audio designer can now collaborate with the coding team to implement this single atmospheric ambiance. This is a simple example with a single parameter, so the coding amount is limited, but even for simple audio tasks, the work required can grow exponentially despite the general tendency of software tools to rely more on visual design and less on coding.
on YouTube: official FMOD channel and Scott Game Sounds ↩︎
notice the visual similarities to DAWs (e.g. Cubase, Ableton) but with a fundamentally different adaptive audio logic. ↩︎