When the conditions in a game change, for example when your character has gone under water, you want your audio to respond to what has occurred. This means that the sounds of any gunfire, or background music, or movements made by the character should sound like the character is under water. To match your audio with the current game situation, use states.
Using states, the Wwise user can effectively create different sets of properties for Busses, Actor-Mixers, Containers, and Sounds to be used depending on the current game state. Properties that can be affected by states include Volume, Pitch, and Low Pass Filter.
Different state groups can be created in Wwise to represent different types of game states, and each of those state groups can contain multiple states. For example, your game could contain the following state groups and states, which would be defined in Wwise by the sound designer:
For these states to work as designed by the Wwise user, the game must properly set the current state for each state group whenever required.
Refer to the Wwise documentation for more information regarding states from the sound designer's point of view.
Refer to Integration Details - States for an overview of how to integrate states in your game.