Minimum audible volume ("high pass volume filter")?

Unity Engine
1

Hi there,

I’m designing a system with 4 speakers - audio needs to be able to be isolated for each of these speakers separately. Because there doesn’t seem to be a way to do this properly inside Unity (if there is, please do tell), I’m placing my audio sources at specific points around the listener: (-1,0,1), (1,0,1), (-1,0,-1) and (1,0,-1). If a sound plays at that location around in the listener in full 3D mode (spatial blend at 1), the sound is only audible from that speaker.

Or at least, it nearly is. The sound is still very quietly audible in the neighbouring speaker, even if I set the min and max distance of the source to the distance of the source to the listener on linear falloff, with falloff scale 10. I could just attenuate all sounds so the quiet audio turns completely silent, but then the sound I do want to be audible is attenuated as well, which is something I’m only willing to do as a last resort.

What I would preferably do is cull audio if it’s quieter than a certain threshold - pretty much an inverse duck volume filter. Is this achievable?

Thanks,

Thomas

2

I can’t answer the question, but in general audio terms “high pass” and “low pass” always refers to frequencies and not volume. A dynamics compressor gets loud and quiet parts closer together so what you are looking for might be an expander that boosts volume dynamics. There are also noisegates that cut off below a certain volume, but I don’t think that is the effect you are looking for.
Or maybe a whole different setting entirely?

3

I know high / low pass filters refer to frequencies, I just used that terminology as an analogy to describe the effect I need since I forgot about noise gates. A noise gate is exactly what I need, but sadly Unity’s Audio Mixer doesn’t come with that effect and a Google search comes up empty.