Designing 3D/Spatialised/zoned music for VR

FMOD Studio
1

Hello again!
I’m working on a demo for a VR game and would like to play with some 3D music and ‘zones’ across a virtual space. I’d the like the mood to seamlessly shift as the player moves around the level, and certain parts of the world should trigger musical motifs or have their own mood. I’m still a little unsure how to use the Spatialiser effect plugins & how to anchor sounds to a particular space.

I’ve developed a reasonable understanding of markers, transitions, tempo settings & parameters over my last project, but am wondering if I’m thinking about this next one the right way.

I could probably easily do a pretty good job just with the above commands & tools, but I like the idea of having musical ‘objects’ in game (which would be tempo locked to the music)… I’m not sure if these should be events within events, or if I need to assign spatialisers to certain instruments only… or if I’ve confused myself entirely.

Based on the loose ideas I’ve outlined, I wonder if anyone might have any suggestions for building the music like this in fmod? Do I need spatialisers for music? Should the music even be 3D? What if I want the music to vary depending on what the player is looking at or where they’re standing etc?

=) thank you very much for your suggestions!
:blue_heart::+1:

2

Spatializers on music events will give the impression that the music is diegetic and coming from somewhere physical in the game’s world. It also would only spatialize the event instance it resides in and not take into consideration other event instances or game objects.

Also, if you are needing the music to stay in sync/tempo with itself then definitely don’t have separate events.

Instead I would recommend having a vertically layered music event. Have the track(s) volume faders automated by parameters named after the different areas in your game world. Now you need to set up some game code to get the distance between the listener and the area, and set the parameter that value. This way the closer you are to that area, the louder those tracks are.

You can see a similar set up in the “Music/Level 02” example event in the Examples project.