Audio

Audio is an important aspect of game development because it enhances players’ experience and immerses them in the game world. It includes sound effects, music, and voice-overs and is used to provide feedback to the player, create an atmosphere, and reinforce the game’s story and themes. Additionally, audio provides important information to the player, such as clues, hints, and warnings. For example, the sounds of cars honking and moving by could help the player anticipate a busy road. So, effective audio design can greatly impact the player’s engagement and enjoyment of a game, making it an essential part of game development.

Audio system in Unity

The audio system in Unity provides a flexible and powerful solution for adding audio to a game. Unity provides us with a detailed audio system allowing the developer to import audio clips for various formats and tweak the audio properties as needed. It includes altering the properties such as pitch, volume, and spatial sounds. Moreover, the audio system mainly consists of an audio lister and audio source component, allowing making audio for 2D or 3D environments. Let’s check out the various components of the audio system and their usage in the Unity Editor.

Overview of audio components

Audio components aid the developer in making a realistic experience for the user. A few of these major components are as follows:

• Audio Listener: This component acts as a listener for all the sounds in the scene. You might have noticed that whenever we create a new scene, an Audio Listener component is always attached to it by default.

• Audio source: This component allows the developer to add a single audio clip or a sequence of them to a Unity scene. We can modify many audio properties such as Volume, Pitch, Spatial Blend, and many more as per our needs.

• Audio clip: The audio clip is the Unity asset that contains sound files. By using these clips as an audio source, Unity games can be made immersive and fascinating.

Overview of audio filters

Unity provides various audio filters to modify the audio clips in many interesting ways, such as adding distortion effects to the audio signal, adding echo, or reducing frequencies.

• Audio Distortion Filter: This filter adds a distortion effect to the signals, creating a wrapped and twisted audio sound.

• Audio Chorus Filter: This filter detunes the audio signals to simulate multiple tracks playing harmoniously. Various parameters in the component can be tweaked as per the requirement.

• Audio High/Low Pass Filter: The Low Pass Filter removes the high frequencies from the audio signals. In contrast, the High Pass Filter removes the low frequencies from the signals, giving a brighter effect to the listener.

• Audio Reverb Filter: This filter tweaks the audio signals to give an impression of sound coming from an acoustic space such as a room or big hall. This filter component allows us to modify the parameters such as dry level, reflection level, and many others to make our audio more realistic.

• Audio Echo Filter: As the name suggests, this filter adds an echo filter to the audio signals.

Adding audio to the Unity scene

We’ve learned about the various audio components; now, let’s see them in action.

1. First, create a Unity project and import any audio file by right-clicking in any asset folder and selecting “Import New Asset.”

2. Create a simple platform from a Cube GameObject and three balls with a Sphere GameObject. Add colors to the GameObject by using materials. Now, we’re ready to add an audio clip to our scene.

3. Attach the imported audio to our green platform.

4. Click the Platform GameObject. Under the “Inspect” window, add the audio source component. Drag and drop the audio clip in its field.

5. Check the “Play on Awake” and “Loop” properties.

Now, click the play button and hear the added audio clip.