ABSTRACT
When we think about designing sound placement in 3D games, we tend to start out with a basis of reality and build our bespoke systems on top of that: attenuation is based on distance to the listener; the loudspeaker matrix is based on orientation to the listener. And yet with all that, the audio mix can end up sounding muddled and undesirably chaotic—much like a documentary film of a gun battle with location sound. In film postproduction (and let's face it, for most of us that is the "gold standard"), the dubbing stage mixer will be very selective in what they bring into focus in the mix and what they'll allow to be masked, and this will change from moment to moment. The sound designer might want to use a relatively wide polar pattern for the azimuth plane as the player is still in relative danger.
