When I place the Google Resonance Audio Listner on my master as recommended in the documentation the stereo field of all events that doesn’t use resonance is narrowed.
E.g. if I have a 2D sound that is panned hard to the left, I hear it in the right speaker when the Resonance Listener is on the master (even when it is bypassed). If I delete the Listener the sound is only heard in the left speaker as expected.
I know the Listener can be place on a mixer group, but that makes my project messy and breaks our implementation for pause menu, so would be really nice with a fix for this.
The behaviour you’re describing is definitely strange - with a Resonance Audio Listener effect on the Master, you shouldn’t be able to hear any sounds besides those that are passed through a Resonance Audio Source before that point. What version of FMOD Studio are you using? Do you have a return with non-Resonance audio placed after the Resonance Listener?
So I found out if an event outputs stereo or mono it does pass through the Resonance Listener, but if it outputs e.g. 5.1 it does not. Is this intentional?
I am actually utilizing it at the moment, so I have some events where one track is spatialized with Resonance, but other tracks are played as 2D sounds.
If the Resonance Audio Listener blocked all non-Resonance sounds, I wouldn’t be able to do this
After a chat with the dev team, I can confirm this is intentional - if the Resonance Listener has a stereo (or mono) input, it will simply mix the stereo input on top of the binaural signal it is producing. If it receives more than 2 channels (i.e. 5.1), then it will discard the signal.
As for the stereo panning issue, it’s likely that your output mode is set to “Headphones”, which would creating a bus panner on the master bus that doesn’t pan each stereo channel completely separately by default:
To fix this, you can either adjust the “Width” value to 180 degrees, or right click on the “Out” meter and change the output to Stereo instead of Headphones.
Am I right understanding that using the Resonance Listener requires the width to be set to 60 degrees, like it does automatically when adding it to a mixer group?
The Resonance Listener doesn’t require that the width be set to 60 degrees, but it is the width that FMOD Studio will default to for the stereo surround panning mode. The issue that you were running into is likely that for Headphones/2.0 and 4.0 speaker formats, the width will be narrower than the speaker positions, which explains the narrowing you’re experiencing. I’ve noted this internally for improvement.
If this is not the case, and you’re outputting some other speaker format after the Resonance Listener, can I get you to upload a screenshot of your master bus’ full effect chain, including the input and output formats/panners?
In general, the expectation for Resonance is that the signal chain after the Listener will be in stereo, because Resonance will perform panning, attenuation, spatialization, HRTF, etc. and then mix down to stereo.
I was just curious if the 60 degrees width is the optimal setting for the Resonance listener’s HRTF to work well?
I guess if I want my stereo sounds that aren’t using Resonance (e.g. music) I should have them on a seperate mixer group set to "Platform (headphones) and 360 degrees width, and Resonance listener on a mixer group set to 60 degrees width. Does that make sense to you?
“Optimal” depends on the needs of your project - it is the “appropriate” setting for 5.0 speaker formats and above because it maintains the expected stereo image.
As previously mentioned, Resonance essentially bakes all of its processing into a standard stereo format, and it doesn’t account for any further panning by FMOD. As a result, if you’re using Headphones/2.0, it should be that the width needs to be set to 180 degrees to have the L/R speaker positions match up with the default speaker positions displayed on the perimeter of the panner. If you do notice any strange/unintended behavior when using 180 degrees, please feel free to let me know.
The train of thought makes sense, but isn’t exactly accurate:
Yes, you’ll likely want two buses, one with a Resonanace listener and one without
If the Resonance listener is outputting in Headphone/2.0 format, you’ll want the width to be 180 degrees, not 60
If your non-Resonanace bus is outputting to a standard surround panner (direction + extent) then you can leave the settings as their defaults (0 degrees direction, 360 degrees extent)
If the non-Resonance bus is instead using the stereo surround panner (axis + width), you’ll want to make sure the width is set so that the L/R speaker positions match the default speaker positions, as previously noted
No, it’s not a bug. When you add the Resonance Listener, the track swaps from using the standard surround panner to the stereo surround panner. 60 degrees is simply the default width setting for the stereo surround panner.
For 5.0 speaker formats and above, this setting is fine, but for 2.0 and 4.0 you’ll want to set it so the L/R speakers match up with the standard positions.
I guess I am just a bit confused about what exactly “standard surround panner” and “stereo surround panner” means and couldn’t find that in the documentation. Could you help clarifying that to me?
Apologies, as those aren’t terms that are used in the Studio documentation. The relevant terms are the “Stereo In: Distributed” and “Stereo In: L/R” modes. When the signal coming into the panner is stereo, but the output format is surround, you can pick between modes by right clicking on the panner. I would recommend reading over the section in the Studio docs regarding the Panner for more information.
