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Analyzing Voices with the Voice Inspector

Why is this sound so loud? Why can't I hear this sound? These are questions sound designers often ask. Through the hierarchy of sounds, Attenuations, Events, RTPCs, and busses, it can be difficult to find the cause of unexpected volume output levels in Wwise. The Voice Inspector allows users to quickly track down the volume drivers of any voice.

Upon selection of a sound in either the Voice Explorer or Voice Monitor, the dry path is automatically selected in the Voice Graph of the Voice Inspector, which displays the full hierarchy of the selected dry path in the Contribution List. All changes made to the Volume/LPF/HPF are displayed in the Contribution List including RTPCs, States, Distance and Cone Attenuations, and Event Actions. These are updated in real time and synced with the Performance Monitor/Voice Monitor time cursor, which allows users to compare values over time by moving the time cursor.

Voice Explorer

The Voice Explorer view contains all Game Objects that have at least one sound playing, whether physical or virtual, at a given time (specified by the time cursor of the Performance Monitor/Voice Monitor). One or multiple active sounds can be displayed under their corresponding Game Objects. When multiple instances of the same sound are currently playing on the same Game Object, the sound name appears multiple times under the Game Object. However, each instance has a different ID and its own Volume/LPF/HPF profiled independently.

Select a sound in the Voice Explorer to update the Voice Graph and Contribution List of the Voice Inspector. The dry path is selected by default. Only one sound can be displayed at a time.

Double-click on sounds to open the Property Editor. Right-click on a sound to display the standard shortcut menu.

Voice Inspector

The Voice Inspector view includes the Voice Graph on the left side and the Contribution List on the right side. The content displayed in this view pertains to the sound selected in either the Voice Explorer or Voice Monitor view.

The Voice Graph displays all the signal paths of the voice from the source to the output(s). Since the Volume/LPF/HPF properties can have different values across the signal paths, only one path is active at a time. The active path is represented by the highlighted connectors between the graph nodes. The property contributions along the selected path are reported in the Contribution List. The properties that are not part of the selected path are not displayed.

To display the property values of different paths, click on the graph node or on the wires belonging to the path you want. You can multiselect nodes (Ctrl+click) if you want to inspect a path that goes through multiple sends (common in Spatial Audio scenarios).

Standard Voice Graph operations, such as double-clicking and right-clicking, are available.

Select an object in the Voice Graph, such as the Master Audio Bus shown in the following image, to highlight the object and the associated path in the Voice Graph. This also highlights the object and its child objects in the Contribution List.

The Contribution List contains, for the selected voice path of the selected sound, all the parent objects from the Master-Mixer, Actor-Mixer, and Interactive Music hierarchies that modify the Volume/LPF/HPF, including all audio and Auxiliary Busses involved in mixing the selected sound.

The Contribution List displays the actual value for Volume/LPF/HPF under each object of the hierarchy. The Driver and Driver Value columns provide details about what caused the property change. You can go to the property page where the property is changed by double-clicking on the property name.

Final Values and Partial Sums

In the Contribution List, the accumulation of all modifications is reported at the top in the Final Value row. In the Volume column, a partial sum is provided for each of the applicable object rows. This indicates the volume modifications made directly on that node for the selected path. Note these partial sums are not provided in the LPF and HPF columns because the way in which they are accumulated varies depending on where the modification is applied in the voice pipeline; sometimes it's by addition, other times by taking the highest or lowest of the values.

The accumulation of all modifications is indicated in the Final Value row.

Partial sums are indicated in the Volume column for each applicable object.

Partial sums are not indicated in the LPF and HPF columns.

[Note]Note

Values that were never modified are not reported at all. However, values that were once modified in the past, but have since come back to a neutral value (0 db), will continue to be displayed indefinitely.


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