More About Audiokinetic*

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My name is Martin Dufour. I'm the CTO of Audiokinetic, and here we are at GDC showing off what we've done with Intel in terms of multicore audio rendering. 

So we're a games audio middleware company. Our product is a combination of an authoring application for sound designers and a runtime audio renderer that is embedded in the game's engine to produce high-quality audio. 

Traditionally, audio in games has been one of the components that always been a bit starved for computing resources. We do all of our audio rendering on the CPU. And we're kind of limited by the amount of processing power there, with most of the power being concentrated into the hands of the graphics aspect of the game. 

So working with Intel with newer CPUs have many more hardware cores than in the past. And our audio rendering solution was only rendering from a single thread, so Intel has helped us modify our audio rendering engine to take advantage of the multicore capabilities of the modern Intel CPU. 

So our engine is used in many types of titles, from AAA to mobile games, and we're really focusing on helping the sound designer create the best audio experience possible. More and more we're seeing that games seem to realize the importance of audio in games. Especially with the advent of VR and AR, it's obvious that audio is a critical component in the immersion aspect of the experience. 

So immersion in terms of graphics is opening the field of view, but really, on the audio side, it's fully spatial audio that completely surrounds the player. So it's been really exciting in the past few years developing new ways to do reverberation and sound propagation to really enhance that sense of immersion into the audio scene. 

Games audio is this really interesting intersection between the traditional linear media, where you have high-quality music and content, and the interactive aspects that comes from having player agency and responding to a constantly changing action inside of the simulation of the game. 

Some new exciting developments beyond spatial audio are interactive music composition. And we're constantly introducing new tools to help make that type of content. 

If you want to learn more about our solutions, just go to our website, and we have blog articles. Wwise itself, the tools are free for learning, for noncommercial uses, and there's also free training material and certification programs that are available.