We have now reached the final chapter of this book. So far, we have worked with audio at many different levels of complexity and abstraction, using both low-level and high-level audio engines. These audio engines provide an invaluable help to the developers, and we should definitely use them whenever possible. With their help, we have loaded and played audio files, learnt how to control sound parameters, simulated sound in 3D environments, and created complex, multi-layered, interactive sounds.
In this chapter, however, we will pretend that these audio engines do not exist, and work with nothing more than the bits and bytes that represent sound in a computer. We will then re-implement, in a simplified form, many of the features that FMOD takes care for us. We will also take a brief look at sound synthesis, which is the act of generating sound using mathematical formulas, instead of relying on recorded audio.
The purpose of this chapter is to further our understanding...