How to handle two or more emitters with the same sound?

Hello, I have audio using spatializer coming from my campfire object in my top-down 2D game in Unity. I’m using the Studio Event Emitter to trigger the audio.

The issue I’m running into is whenever there are multiple campfires right next to each other. The sounds can merge and it sounds very plasticky. What is the best way that I could approach this? My ideal scenario is that there is only one sound when more than one sound is found (prioritizing the loudest one, aka: closest one). I tried modifying the max instances, but that completely kill the audio in the other campfires. For now I created an offset randomization as a workaround so they don’t merge that badly.

Thank you!

You’re on the right track: Randomization is the key. The issues you’ve observed occur because the different campfire event instances are producing near-identical output, and so easily sound artificial or exhibit audio artifacts when more than one of them are in close proximity. Randomly varying their behavior should improve things substantially.

Randomizing start offset is a good start.

Randomizing the pitch and volume of your campfire events or their constituent instruments within a small range (perhaps ~6 dB and ~0.5 s/t) will go a long way towards making them sound different and preventing artifacting.

Using multi instruments or scatterer instruments to randomly select from playlists of multiple different campfire sound assets can help even further, provided the assets are sufficiently different.