In this week’s Wwise study, I learned about the logic of Wwise’s audio signal flow. I found it very difficult to understand this part of the study because I needed to organize the various objects in the Actor-Mixer Hierarchy. Because if similar things are put together, you can use the properties of the container to apply features like pitch randomization to all objects quickly. And if you are involved in a huge project and need to go through many objects, managing these audio objects is a perfect place to start.

So I needed to create the Actor-Mixer in order to manage these objects better. At first, I thought that the audio signal of all the objects in the Actor-Mixer would be one way, and the volume fader on the General setting of the Actor-Mixer would be the total volume after merging. But then I realized that Actor-Mixer doesn’t do any mixing, and the sounds contained in it are not mixed together.

In practice, the numeric properties of an Acter-Mixer object, such as Voice Volume or Low-pass filter, represent a bias that is applied to the corresponding properties of all the objects in the Actor-Mixer. For example, if this Actor-Mixer has a Voice Volume property of -3, then the Voice Volume of each object it contains will be reduced by 3dB, although you may not see this reduction when looking directly at the objects inside. Because this effect is cumulative, if an Actor-Mixer is loaded into another Actor-Mixer or any other object with a Voice Volume parameter, such as a random or sequence container, the offsets on all the objects involved will be added together to determine the volume value of the source sound each time it is played. Volume value each time the source sound is played.