Game audio

How sound in games and virtual environments is designed, assessed and perceived.

How sound designers and engineers assess the quality of sound in games, with the aim of sharing best practice and building better tools. This now includes objective approaches to estimating acoustic and audio-visual complexity in virtual environments.

Papers

Teaser figure: MAV-C audio-visual complexity framework. Audio features (temporal, spectral and spatial entropy) and video features (edge gradients, colour uniqueness, optical-flow motion) are compressed and weighted into sub-scores C_A(t) and C_V(t), then fused into a single complexity score C_AV(t) between 0 and 1. Validated on synthetic stimuli, synthetic sweeps and 60 gameplay clips.

Conference2026 · Proceedings of the AES 6th International Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality and Immersive Games (AVARIG 2026)

MAV-C: A Framework for the Joint Objective Estimation of Audio-Visual Complexity in Immersive Virtual Environments

Resti, L., Gully, A., McLoughlin, M., Kearney, G., & Denisova, A.

MAV-C estimates how complex an immersive virtual environment is to see and hear. It combines audio features (temporal, spectral and spatial) with visual features (edges, colour and motion) into a single score that changes over time, without needing a reference recording.

Summary and key findings: MAV-C: A Framework for the Joint Objective Estimation of Audio-Visual Complexity in Immersive Virtual Environments PDF of MAV-C: A Framework for the Joint Objective Estimation of Audio-Visual Complexity in Immersive Virtual Environments (accepted version)

Teaser figure: Spherical Acoustic Spatial Entropy (SASE). The method splits the space around the listener into equal-area regions, weights each source by perceived loudness and measures how evenly sound is spread. In a listening experiment (N = 21), SASE best predicted perceived complexity (R² = 0.714), ahead of energy and spectral entropy; together with spectral variability it explained 84.4% of the variance.

Journal2026 · IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing

Spherical Acoustic Spatial Entropy: Predicting Acoustic Scene Complexity in Virtual Environments

Resti, L., Gully, A., McLoughlin, M., Kearney, G., & Denisova, A.

How complex a soundscape feels depends not only on which sounds are present but on where they are. We introduce Spherical Acoustic Spatial Entropy (SASE), a measure that predicts how complex a virtual acoustic scene sounds from how loud each sound source is in each direction around the listener.

Summary and key findings: Spherical Acoustic Spatial Entropy: Predicting Acoustic Scene Complexity in Virtual Environments PDF of Spherical Acoustic Spatial Entropy: Predicting Acoustic Scene Complexity in Virtual Environments (accepted version) Publisher's version of Spherical Acoustic Spatial Entropy: Predicting Acoustic Scene Complexity in Virtual Environments

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

Conference2025 · IEEE Conference on Games (CoG'25)

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

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

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.

Indie developers and the games industry

Summary and key findings: Perspectives of Sound Designers on Real-Time Sound Propagation in Games PDF of Perspectives of Sound Designers on Real-Time Sound Propagation in Games (accepted version) Publisher's version of Perspectives of Sound Designers on Real-Time Sound Propagation in Games

Teaser figure: Board games with a soundtrack. Photos of the cooperative board game Fuse and its timer app. Fourteen players compared silence, time announcements, and a full soundtrack. The full soundtrack brought more enjoyment and tension than announcements alone, announcements gave no gain over silence, and players described sound as creating atmosphere.

ConferenceCORE conference ranking: CORE A*2022 · Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'22)

The Effects of a Soundtrack on Board Game Player Experience

Farkas, T., Denisova, A., Wiseman, S., & Fiebrink, R.

Board games are increasingly augmented with apps and soundtracks, but little is known about how this changes play. We ran a mixed-methods study of how music and sound effects affect the experience of playing a board game.

Immersion and game features

Summary and key findings: The Effects of a Soundtrack on Board Game Player Experience PDF of The Effects of a Soundtrack on Board Game Player Experience (accepted version) Publisher's version of The Effects of a Soundtrack on Board Game Player Experience

Other publications

Acoustic Indicators of Join Quality in Concatenated Sports Video Game Commentary Poster Resti, L., McLoughlin, M., Kearney, G., Denisova, A., & Gully, A. · 2025 · UK and Ireland Speech Workshop (UKIS 2025)