Example Materials: Interactive Audio

The spring semester of Year 2 is built around one project that every composer takes from an empty FMOD session to a playable game. The materials below are what they work from — the brief, the step-by-step guides, and the supporting references — all public in the knowledge base.

The Project

Unity+FMOD — Survival Game

The assignment. Using only Spitfire LABS, BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover, or their DAW’s stock instruments, each composer creates, composes, and implements all of the sound effects and music for Unity’s Survival Shooter — a top-down wave shooter with a player, three enemy types, and UI, stripped of its audio. The brief is stylistic as well as technical: a hybrid design that blends real and improbable SFX with synthesized and acoustic music, evoking a whimsical, childlike dream state or nightmare.

The music must include an introduction, at least one transition timeline, three levels of intensity that change with the player’s score, and effects or compositional changes that respond to the player’s health. Sixteen FMOD events (player, three enemies, music, game over — 2D and 3D) and five parameters (score, health, and three mix levels) are implemented and connected to the game; every event routes through an SFX or Music group bus. Evaluation is 8 points for the functionality of the systems and their integration, 2 points for realizing the brief. The page includes the full event and parameter tables with their Unity locations, and the starter Unity and Reaper projects.

The Challenge

Epic Drums: FMOD Adaptive Music Challenge

An adaptive-music brief with no FMOD instruction at all. Each composer plays the audio implementer on a game: the composer has delivered nine audio files (171 BPM in 5/4) and a description of how the score must behave, and the job is to build it in FMOD Studio so the game can run the whole score by changing one global parameter, Control. The brief says what the player must hear and never which FMOD features to use. The score has an intro that plays once, three looping sections whose ring-outs must never be cut, six composed transition moves (the ones into Sections 02 and 03 pass through a single measure of 6/4), exits that wait for the end of a pass, and an ending stinger that stops the event on its own.

Help opens up in stages. The first 30 minutes are solo, with only the manual, web searches, forums, and videos. Classmates come in at 30 minutes, AI-generated search results at 1 hour, and AI chatbots at 1.5 hours, as long as the brief itself never goes into the chat. There is nothing to hand in. Each build is evaluated in class against a seven-step test checklist, with Control changed live in FMOD Studio. The page has the audio files to download, stems of one play-through with a MIDI tempo map to import into a DAW, and a timeline that shows where every file lands on the bar grid for each move.

The Guides

FMOD Survival Shooter Unity Integration

The semester’s spine: a 5,500-word, screenshot-by-screenshot walkthrough from cloning the project to a fully adaptive score. It covers FMOD concepts and project organization; integrating FMOD for Unity; building the FMOD project from the audio assets; background music; triggering FMOD events from C# scripts; the gunshot; connecting each enemy’s events to its animations and state; controlling the mix with group buses; two real debugging sections (enemy SFX that won’t fire, music that keeps playing after the player dies); and finally driving FMOD events and parameters from the player’s health and score. It ends with a challenge that becomes the project.

FMOD Unity C# Scripting

The scripting reference for composers who have never written code: the FMOD namespace, referencing events, triggering them from scripts and from animation events, controlling parameters from Unity sliders and toggles, and applying, reverting, and blending mixer snapshots.

Basic Audio Scripting in Unity with C# · Quick Start Guide to Unity C# Scripting for Beginners

How Unity’s own audio system works — sources, clips, playing on events, controlling properties — and enough C# to read and modify a game’s scripts. Composers learn Unity’s built-in audio first so they understand what FMOD replaces and why.

Unity Basics: Working with Audio · Clone Unity Survival Shooter Project

Setting up the editor, the project, and version control so that Week 4’s clone works the first time.

Supporting References

How We Hear Spatialized Sounds

The theory behind the spatial-audio week: how two ears localize sound in four dimensions (lateral, front/back, elevation, distance), what cues each dimension depends on, and how that perception maps onto delivery systems, distribution formats, spatialization techniques, and environment modeling. A 6,000-word essay, read before the composers tune attenuation curves and spatializers on the game’s enemies.

Pro Tools Session Prep · Score Prep · Pro Tools: Working with Playlists

The recording-session week. What the engineer needs in the session before the players arrive; what a session musician needs on the stand; how to comp the takes afterward.

The Semester

The week-by-week plan, with each week’s topics, in-class hands-on work, and resources: Spring 2026 syllabus & calendar.