Honours Dissertation

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Introduction

For my honours dissertation, I wanted to push my sound design skills past the limit while exploring how interactive audio works in games. This project had two main parts:

1. Recreating the soundscapes and SFX for a cinematic video without hearing the original audio.
2. Learning FMOD and C# to integrate my own sounds into a game engine.

What started as an advanced sound design challenge quickly became a turning point in my journey, revealing my passion for audio programming and problem-solving.

Recreating a Cinematic Soundscape

For the first part of the project, I chose ADAM: Episode One and stripped away all of its original audio. Without ever hearing how it sounded before, I built an entirely new sonic environment based purely on what I felt from the visuals.

This experience pushed me to think outside the box, using creative Foley techniques to craft immersive, believable sounds:

• Deodorant cans for the release of the wires.
• Squelching a leather belt to mimic latex tearing.
• Clashing two forks together for robotic mechanical movement.

Every element had to captivate the listener while staying true to the atmosphere of the video, making it one of the most rewarding sound design projects I’ve ever worked on.

From Sound to Code – Interactive Audio in Games

The second part of my honours dissertation focused on how audio is implemented into middleware, processed, and manipulated to create an immersive game experience.

To achieve this, I taught myself FMOD and C# and integrated my custom sound assets into the Unity Game Engine. This required learning:

• How middleware like FMOD processes and controls in-game audio.
• The basics of C# coding, starting from the very foundations.
• The workflow of integrating sound assets dynamically into Unity.
• Despite the workload — creating sound assets, composing music, learning two new software tools, and writing code from scratch — this project became a pivotal moment in my career. It ultimately revealed my hidden passion for coding and problem-solving.

Final Thoughts

What started as an exploration of sound design ended up unlocking a whole new creative direction for me. This project didn’t just refine my sound design skills — it laid the foundation for my journey into game audio programming.

This was the moment I knew coding would become a huge part of my future.