Summary - The Function of Sound in Games

Paul Arnold, Andrew Barnabas
The Function of Sound in Games
(retrieved from http://www.bobandbarn.com/articles/index.php?page=soundgames)

The article briefly describes the different areas of sound in games and its subregions. Generally, audio in games can be divided into:

- Music
o Linear
o Non-linear
o Source Music
- Sound Effects
o Spot Effects
o Ambience
o Foley
- Dialogue
o In-game
o Non-linear

Music
Music generally enhances the mood and atmosphere, and can help the pace. Linear music is used for things such as ambient music, in cutscenes, or any other place where the music doesn’t have to change. Interactive music is reasonably unexplored because music is linear in nature. This is either negated by trying to establish the general mood of a scene and scoring that, or writing specific cues for specific situations, like in film music. However, due to the vast number of situations possible in a game, this poses issues in terms of development time and budget.
A final variant of music in games is source music, which is music that characters in the game can hear or respond to, whether the actual source of the sound within the world is clear or not.

Sound Effects
Sound FX generally reinforce the current actions. Spot Effects account for most of the effects synchronised with entities in the game. Ambience sounds include all diegetic continuous sounds in the background. Foley sounds are all sounds that don’t convey important gameplay information, but instead are small sounds that can greatly enhance the sense of realism in the game.

Dialogue
Dialogue brings characters to life and can convey more complex and specific information, as well as create emotional bindings with characters. Linear dialogue is text that does not need to take into account the various possibilities of a game, for instance during cutscenes and events that will always occur. In-game dialogue however can depend on how a player has played the game thus far and will have to take into account many situations.