Research / Game audio

Full paper · 2025

Perspectives of Sound Designers on Real-Time Sound Propagation in Games

Han, Y., Denisova, A., Vasiliou, C., Schembri, D., Jones, M., & Murphy, D.

ConferenceIEEE Conference on Games (CoG'25), 2025

Teaser figure: Sound propagation in games. An online survey of professional game sound designers (110 responses, 20 retained). Top priorities were staying within CPU limits and seamless transitions between environments; highly accurate physical calculation ranked lowest. Top challenges were extensive manual editing and computational cost, and only one designer validated against physical measurements. 54% wanted a balance between physical accuracy and creative control, and 53% felt low-pass filtering is enough for diffraction. Implications: optimise for perception over physics, build better tools, and work across disciplines.
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In short

Realistic sound propagation, how sound travels through and around a virtual space, matters for immersive game audio, but getting it right means balancing physical accuracy against creative design. We reviewed physics-based techniques for real-time sound propagation and surveyed professional game sound designers (20 complete responses after screening) about their approaches, priorities and the challenges they face.

Key findings

  • Designers’ top priorities were staying within CPU limits and seamless transitions between environments; highly accurate physical calculation ranked lowest.
  • The biggest challenges were extensive manual editing and computational cost, and only one designer validated their work against physical measurements.
  • Most wanted a balance between physical accuracy and creative control, pointing to perception-driven methods, better tools and closer collaboration between researchers and the industry.

What this means for game audio

  • Reverb is a good example of an area where sound designers waste far too much time worrying about how accurate and realistic it is, only for it to be lost in the mix of music and effects

    A sound designer in the survey

  • Not many players will be able to tell the difference, even when asked to comment on this in a playtest

    A sound designer in the survey

  • Pursuing increasing realism is not necessarily a priority in game audio development.

    Discussion

  • While physics-based models provide a valuable foundation, practical implementation prioritizes perceptual plausibility, computational efficiency, and workflow adaptability.

    Conclusion

Read and cite

PDF (accepted version) Publisher's version (DOI)

APA citation

Han, Y., Denisova, A., Vasiliou, C., Schembri, D., Jones, M., & Murphy, D. (2025). Perspectives of Sound Designers on Real-Time Sound Propagation in Games. In IEEE Conference on Games (CoG'25) (pp. 1-8).

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