Audio
Audio in VNs are the sounds, such as music, sound effects and voice acting that the game makes (I guess if the game let the player make sounds into a microphone that the game reacted to, that too would be audio, but it's not particularly common in VNs.) The player can hear the sound through headpones (or earbuds) or loudspeakers.
Types of sound
Audio can add a lot to a VN, such as setting a scene's mood through music or ambiance, having things make sounds to make them more interesting. And voice acting can help show the personalities of characters, while also making the text easier to read for players who struggle to read (such as due to dyslexia or blindness).
Stereo panning
Visual novel engines can usually play audio in stereo, meaning that different sounds are played for each ear or through different speakers. The audio may have been recorded in stereo, or it may have been recorded with only one channel (mono) and then be manipulated in-engine to make it come from one direction or another (stereo panning). It can be useful to give the players information about where something is happening, and voice lines can be panned to make the speakers easier to tell apart and to link the sound to the sprite positions on screen.
Audio which isn't played in a specific position is called mono, monaural, or center-panned. It can be useful for players who can't hear well with both ears (though, as long as they use stereo headphones, they should also be able to hear A-B stereo.
The simplest type of stereo panning is X-Y stereo, where the sound is made quieter in one side in order to make it sound like it comes from the other side. So to make a sound appear to come from the left you can play it in the left speaker only, or to make it sound like it comes from a "leftish" position between the middle and the left, it could be played quieter in the right speaker but louder in the left one. A-B stereo could also be recorded using actual microphones by pointing two cardioid microphones in different directions while keeping them very close to each other.
The simplest type of stereo panning is A-B stereo, where the sound is played slightly later to one ear than to the other. This works better in headphones than in speakers, since with speakers both ears would hear the sounds of both speakers. It works because sound takes time to get from the source to the ears and if it's closer to one ear than to the other, it'll arrive slightly earlier to one ear than to the other.
It's also possible to combine both approaches, and if the sound is supposed to come from one side it may be muffled in the opposite side. Sounds from afar would also be muffled just from traveling a long distance. And sounds would also be quieter the further away they come. There are also more complex ways of simulating how sounds from different angles will sound to a pair of ears, and a physical way to record such sounds is to put microphones in artificial ears on a mannequin head.
Surround sound is sound played through more than two loudspeakers. For example, this arrangement is known as 5.1 (five speakers and one subwoofer):
- Front left,
- front right,
- front center,
- back left,
- back right,
- a subwoofer.
There are also surround formats that have speakers above or below the listener.
File formats
Some common audio file formats are:
- FLAC,
- Ogg, which can contain codecs such as:
- Vorbis,
- Opus (an Ogg file with Opus audio may use the .opus extension),
- MP3,
- WAV, which can contain codecs such as:
- Uncompressed (linear) Pulse Code Modulation,
- Compressed codecs (not supported in many engines).
- Quite Okay Audio (intended specifically for game audio, but not widely supported in VN engines).
Out of these, WAV with uncompressed PCM and FLAC are lossless, and the other ones are lossy. Lossless formats take up more space but keep all the information, whereas lossy ones drop information that may not be very noticeable. So when saving something to modify later you probably want to use a lossless format, but for playback in a game it may be more useful to use lossy formats since they take up less space. Different formats may also be simpler or more complex, which could matter if you're playing a lot of sounds at the same time and need them to be as easy as possible for the player's computer to decode fast.
See also
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