I have a 4-screen Unity setup that I use in scientific experiments. The subject, a rodent, sits at the centre and can rotate but not translate in the physical world (but can translate in the virtual world).
I am now trying to add in sound using 8-speakers, spaced equally around the subject in the real world. I only need one virtual sound source (at least for now) but I would like distance attenuation and conical attenuation for each of the listeners independently. I am using a MOTU device for routing the sound to 4 pairs of speakers (i.e. 8 in total). And I'm running on Windows 10.
So far I have managed to:
- setup 4 AkListeners that receive distance-attenuated sound from a sound source
- used the azimuth RTPC to give a single listener conical attenuation
However I can't see how to give each of the listeners their own independent conical attenuation unless I clone the sound and hook each listener up to its own sound. This seems like a bad idea in terms of synchronising the duplicated sound. It also seems rather complicated. Incidentally I'm not an audio expert and am unclear of the best way to actually setup the attenuation/mixing/panning to bring the virtual sounds into the real world on my 8 speakers (but lets ignore that for now).
I don't mind writing some code to control the attenuation explicitly as the virtual environment is very simple and the maths can't be that hard, but I don't know if there is a (good, i.e. performant and recommended) way to apply a custom attenuation to each of 8 listeners that are listening to the same sound.
Also I will eventually need to figure out how to independently control the two speakers within each of the 4 pairs so that they behave like 8 mono speakers rather than 4 stereo speakers.
I wondered whether I might have gone down the wrong route completely? Perhaps there is a much easier way of doing this if I am happy to stick with simple virtual geometry and can write the volume outputs myself?
I would be very greatful for any suggestions.
-daniel