Underwater Sound Tricks?

I’m curious about ideas anyone has on making sounds sound a bit different underwater (kinda muffled?)
Like if your head goes underwater the waterfall sound should change (maybe all the water sound should change?)
I’m not sure if this could be done with just changing pitch and volume? (about to try [using regular MG audio right now]) Maybe I’d need to do something with FMOD or something? I guess I’m wondering if there are other audio options I don’t know of or if there are fmod tricks for doing this well. Or maybe it would be just as good to make underwater versions of all applicable sounds and switch sound to used in Set based on an underwater_bool ?
Any thoughts?

Personally, unless it’s an audio simulation, I would just swap the sound assets for an muffled version when they are under water :slight_smile:

Hmm. Yah, I think that might be the best option since you do have full control of how it sounds then. Thanks for the feedback - I feel more confident in this idea now. :slight_smile:

1 Like

This reminds me, I need to put my audio framweork into me engine lol

1 Like

It would be cool to do this programmatically though!

I once wanted to write code to sync effects in the game to the beat of the music that was playing and did a bunch of digging. Unfortunately, what I needed wasn’t exposed in the XNA api, so it’s unlikely that it would be in the MonoGame api either. You just don’t seem to get much fine-grained control over audio.

The upside is that there’s a lot of external libraries that do give you much more control. A bit of googling might yield some results that would open up the possibility to explore what you want to do :slight_smile:

Side note… I was just thinking it’s interesting that we don’t really have anything like a graphics shader for audio, but then I googled and found this:

Could be interesting :slight_smile:

3 Likes

I just happened to be trying to accomplish this a few months ago. I had pretty good success with getting a good underwater sound by using Audacity and applying a low pass filter to my original sound effects.

2 Likes

Audio-shader - OMG that just blew my mind! XD

2 Likes

Wow, the low-pass filter trick sounds perfect! Thanks :slight_smile:

FMOD has realtime lowpass filter.

1 Like

That’s a great option if I end up with hundreds of SFX. I think I’m already beyond 100. ;p