Procedural Audio Generation Applied to Digital Games

• Autor(a) principal: Sofia Ferreira Quintas, Juliana
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/11110/1768
• topic: Digital game; procedural audio; sound design

The current standard of interactive audio in digital games takes a heavy toll on independent game developers limited human and technical resources. Procedural audio generation is a possible solution for independent developers to keep sound design affordable and dynamic without sacrificing creative control. The goal of this dissertation is to understand if procedural audio is a relevant and feasible technique for independent developers and if current technology allows a cost-effective customizable implementation. This research was approached through the Design Thinking methodology, which comprises of 5 stages: empathy with the target public – independent game developers and sound designers –, definition of the problem, ideation, prototyping and testing. As part of the Empathy and Problem Definition stages, game audio and sound synthesis concepts were studied, and the state of the art was reviewed in order to present the advantages and challenges of procedural audio for digital games. Desirable features for procedural game audio were collected from literature review to meet the current needs of audio professionals in the game industry. The Ideation phase assessed the viability of developing custom procedural audio tools for Unity’s game engine through the open source audio programming languages Pure Data, Csound and SuperCollider. Csound was selected as the fittest language for the final prototype and three instruments for sound effect procedural generation were developed and tested within Unity in combination with other interactive game elements. This prototype was evaluated according to the defined objectives: its strongest aspects are its flexible aesthetic, potential for realistic behaviour and compatibility with a mixed approach and object-oriented paradigm; however, its computational cost and lack of an intuitive architecture do not allow a broader application of this technique.