Research Seminars

Introduction to Audio for Games

Michael Kelly
Sony Computer Entertainment Europe

Wednesday 25th April 2007, 16:00

Building Access: The Engineering Building is under access control. To gain entry, please call 020 7882 7986.

Abstract

In the past games consoles provided limited resources for audio processing. Audio systems were often fixed in hardware and general purpose processors, used mainly for graphics and gameplay calculations, were not usually available to perform audio processing. In contrast, modern consoles contain little dedicated audio hardware but have more flexibility to use the high-power, DSP focused CPUs. This talk gives a high-level introduction to audio for games and describes the challenges that sound design for interactive applications presents. It demonstrates how these challenges are met, from a creative and technical standpoint by illustrating the tools and application programming interfaces used during game development. The talk concludes with a view of the audio system in modern a modern games console and discusses both the opportunities and challenges that the new technology presents.