This is the site for work by Richard Stevens and Dave Raybould.
We're all about game audio implementation.

Introduction to MetaSounds

This is an intro to getting up and running with UE5’s MetaSounds – hopefully people find it useful. It's not trying to cover every single possible use of MetaSounds, or all of the available functions – it’s more about just the basics and how to recreate some of the functionality of SoundCues.

Unreal Online Tutorials

We collaborated with Epic Games Online Learning team to produce a series of video-based courses on implementing sound and music within the Unreal Engine:

Acoustic Ecology Revisited: Adapting to Audio in Unreal Engine

This is a presentation we gave at the Game Audio Conference Oslo (www.gainorway.com/gaco2023). In it we look at how game audio might adapt some concepts from acoustic ecology, and we provide some practical demonstrations of how you might do this in Unreal Engine using envelope following, spectral analysis, metasounds and audio busses.

How To Quickly Get Started With Game Audio In Unreal Engine

So, you’re wanting to get started with audio in Unreal..? Not sure where to start..? This article will provide you with a quick primer to get you up and running with sound in Unreal fairly quickly.

Why Procedural Game Sound Design Is So Useful

How do you keep your game audio varied – without needing countless individual audio files? Procedural sound design can help with exactly that.

Dynamic & Interactive Music Using Unreal Engine's Quartz System

In this talk and live demo, we discuss the fundamental techniques of dynamic music for video games, and show you how to build systems to implement these in Unreal engine.

Unity Audio Quickstart

Covers importing sounds, setting up attenuations, and adding sounds to Prefabs. Also contains some basic examples of coding audio-based systems.

FMOD Quickstart

Covers integrating FMOD within a Unity project, importing sounds, setting up attenuations, and adding sounds to Prefabs. Also contains some basic examples of code that can be used to call FMOD-based events.

Game Audio Implementation

A unique practical approach to learning all about game audio. If you've always wanted to hear your sound or music in a real game then this is the book for you. Each chapter is accompanied by its own game level where you can see the techniques and theories in action before working through over 70 exercises to develop your own demo level. Taking you all the way from first principles to complex interactive systems in the industry standard Unreal Engine, you’ll gain the skills to implement your sound and music along with a deep transferable knowledge of the principles you can apply across a range of other game development tools.

The Game Audio Tutorial

Design and implement video game sound from beginning to end with this hands-on course in game audio. Music and sound effects speak to players on a deep level, and this book will show you how to design and implement powerful, interactive sound that measurably improves gameplay. If you are a sound designer or composer and want to do more than just create audio elements and hand them over to someone else for insertion into the game, this book is for you. You'll understand the game development process and implement vital audio experiences-not just create music loops or one-off sound effects.

The inherent conflicts of musical interactivity in video games

This chapter focuses on active gameplay episodes, and interactive music, where the unique challenges of musical interactivity lie. When music accompanies active gameplay a number of conflicts, tensions, and paradoxes arise. In this chapter these will be articulated and interrogated through three key questions:
Do we score a player’s experience, or do we direct it?
How do we distil our aesthetic choices into a computer algorithm?
How do we reconcile the players freedom to instigate events at indeterminate times with musical forms that are time-based?

Designing a game for music: Integrathed design approaches for Ludic music & interactivity

The question of how interactive music should function in games is perhaps a misleading one, as there are many different types of games and many different types of players. One of the most compelling explanations for the huge popularity of video games is that they meet people’s intrinsic psychological needs quickly, with consistency, and with great frequency. Since it is clear that player satisfaction is a product of “needs met” over “needs”, it is important that we recognize that music should operate in different ways in different circumstances.

The reality paradox: Authenticity, fidelity, and the real in Battlefield 4

This paper examines how the Battlefield series of games facilitates player immersion3 in the game world by appropriating audio characteristics from our typically mediated experience of conflict and through a meticulous approach to modeling an authentic real-world audio experience. The paper also discusses how we might reconcile this immersion in the seemingly real and authentic with the presence of the more artificial or inauthentic ludic elements of the soundtrack required to support gameplay.

Extreme Ninjas use windows, not doors:
Addressing video game fidelity through ludo-narrative music in the stealth genre

Through a methodical analysis of the functions of audio in the stealth genre this paper identifies the limitations of current binary threshold approaches to audio feedback and puts forward music as a potential vehicle for providing richer data to the player. Music is accepted as a continuous audio presence and is able to provide information to help to prevent player failure, rather than sound effects or dialogue which often serve simply as a notification of failure.