Sound Effects

From the “bing” of a coin box in Super Mario Bros to the reveal chimes of the Zelda series, sound effects provide a powerful mechanism for informing the player of what is happening in your game world.

SoundEffect Class

MonoGame represents sound effects with the SoundEffect class. Like other asset types, we don’t normally construct this directly, we rather load it through the content pipeline. Usually, a sound effect will start as a .wav file, though a handful of other file formats are acceptable.

Once loaded, the SoundEffect can be played with the SoundEffect.Play() method. This is essentially a fire-and-forget method - you invoke, it and the framework takes care of loading and playing the sound.

You can also use the SoundEffect.Play(float volume, float pitch, float pan) to customize the playback:

• volume ranges from $ 0.0 $ (silence) to $ 1.0 $ (full volume)
• pitch adjusts the pitch from $ -1.0 $ (down an octave) to $ 1.0 $ (up an octave), with $ 0.0 $ indicating no change
• pan pans the sound in stereo, with $ -1.0 $ entirely on the left speaker, and $ 1.0 $ on the right, and $ 0.0 $ centered.

Note that the per-sound-effect volume is multiplied by the static SoundEffect.MasterVolume property. This allows for the adjustment of all sound effects in the game, separate from music.

SoundEffectInstance Class

If you need finer control of your sound effects, you can also create a SoundEffectInstance from one with: SoundEffect.CreateInstance(). This represents a single instance of a sound effect, so invoking its Play() method will restart the sound from the beginning (essentially, SoundEffect.Play() creates a SoundEffectInstance that plays and disposes of itself automatically).

The SoundEffectInstance exposes properties that can be used to modify its behavior:

• IsLooped is a boolean that when set to true, causes the sound effect to loop indefinitely.
• Pan pans the sound in stereo, with $ -1.0 $ entirely on the left speaker, and $ 1.0 $ on the right, and $ 0.0 $ centered.
• Pitch adjusts the pitch from $ -1.0 $ (down an octave) to $ 1.0 $ (up an octave), with $ 0.0 $ indicating no change
• Volume ranges from $ 0.0 $ (silence) to $ 1.0 $ (full volume)
• State returns a SoundState enumeration value, one of (SoundState.Paused, SoundState.Playing, or SoundState.Stopped)

The SoundEffectInstance also provides a number of methods:

• Play() plays or resumes the sound effect
• Pause() pauses the sound effect
• Resume() resumes a paused sound effect
• Stop() immediately stops the sound effect (so when started it starts from the beginning)
• Stop(bool immediate) also stops the sound effect, immediately if true, or its authored release phase, i.e. a fade, if false

Perhaps the strongest reason for creating a SoundEffectInstance is to be able to crate positional sound. We’ll discuss this next.