How to play a sound with variations

One of the ways to make your machine more professional is to use different variations of sounds in your machine. This will add variety and make your audio less predictable and more “alive”. This guide explains how to play a sound with multiple variations in your machine. Sound support is part of the MPF media controller and only available if you’re using MPF-MC for your media controller. This guide assumes you have already configured your sound system for your machine and are familiar with the basic sound setup concepts. If not, please start with the Setting up sound for your machine guide first.

1. An brief introduction to sound pools

Sound pools allow you to group multiple sounds together and treat the pool as a single sound. Each time a sound pool is played, it selects a sound from its group of sounds. The selection can be configured to be random or in a particular sequence. For more complete information, please read the sound_pools documentation.

Although sound pools can be used to play a random music track or random callout when an event occurs, in this guide we will be using a sound pool to play variations of a sound when a slingshot is hit.

2. Add a sound and some variations

Before we can create our sound pool, we first need to configure the individual sounds that will make up our pool. We’ve decided we want to have a small ding (like a triangle hit) play whenever the slingshot is hit. Let’s start by adding our basic sound to our sound assets. The hardest part of this process is to either generate or find the sound you want (we won’t go into that process here). Once you have your sound file, put it in the appropriate sound asset folder. I found a simple triangle sound on www.freesound.org that we’ll use here, 13147__looppool__triangle1.wav. Place the file in your sound effects track folder (<machine_folder>/sounds/sfx). Now we’ll add it to your machine configuration file, but give it an easier name to remember (triangle_01) using the file: setting (or you could simply rename the file to triangle_01.wav and omit the file: setting):

sounds:
  triangle_01:
    file: 13147__looppool__triangle1.wav
    volume: 0.7
This example is tested to be valid MPF config. However, it is not integration tested.
sounds:
  triangle_01:
    file: 13147__looppool__triangle1.wav
    volume: 0.7

Now add a few variations of the sound. I used my favorite sound editor to slightly adjust the pitch and frequency content of the triangle sound file, creating three variations. You can also just find some other similar sounds on the internet. After you have your variations, place them in the same directory as your first sound file. We are now ready to add them to the sounds: section in the machine configuration file (I named the sound variations triangle_02, triangle_03, and triangle_04:

sounds:
  triangle_01:
    file: 13147__looppool__triangle1.wav
    volume: 0.7
  triangle_02:
    volume: 0.7
  triangle_03:
    volume: 0.7
  triangle_04:
    volume: 0.7
This example is tested to be valid MPF config. However, it is not integration tested.
sounds:
  triangle_01:
    file: 13147__looppool__triangle1.wav
    volume: 0.7
  triangle_02:
    volume: 0.7
  triangle_03:
    volume: 0.7
  triangle_04:
    volume: 0.7

3. Configure the sound pool

We now have 4 variations of the same basic triangle sound. It’s time to put them all into a single sound pool object so we can treat them as a single sound. To do so, we need to add a sound_pools: section to our machine configuration file as follows:

sound_pools:
  triangle:
    type: random
    sounds:
      - triangle_01
      - triangle_02
      - triangle_03
      - triangle_04
This example is tested to be valid MPF config. However, it is not integration tested.
sound_pools:
  triangle:
    type: random
    sounds:
      - triangle_01
      - triangle_02
      - triangle_03
      - triangle_04

We now have a sound pool asset called triangle that acts just like a sound asset, except that each time triangle is played, one of the 4 sound variations contained in the sound pool will randomly be selected to be played. Want to add more variations or take one out? It’s just as simple as modifying the list of sounds in the sound pool.

This is great, but let’s adjust the sound pool settings a bit to fine tune its behavior. We really want the main sound (triangle_01) to be played more often than the other sounds. How can we make that happen? It’s very easy to do. We can add weights to each sound in the pool that specify the probability of each sound being selected. Let’s look at our sound_pools: section again:

sound_pools:
  triangle:
    type: random
    track: sfx
    sounds:
      - triangle_01|5
      - triangle_02|2
      - triangle_03|2
      - triangle_04|1
This example is tested to be valid MPF config. However, it is not integration tested.
sound_pools:
  triangle:
    type: random
    track: sfx
    sounds:
      - triangle_01|5
      - triangle_02|2
      - triangle_03|2
      - triangle_04|1

Notice we’ve added a pipe character (|) to the end of each sound followed by a numeric value. These values assign a relative weight to each sound that will be used in the random selection process. triangle_01 has a relative weight of 5 out of a total weighting of 10 (simply add all the weight values), therefore its probability of being selected is 50%. The |1 appended to triangle_04 is unnecessary because a relative weight of 1 is the default value for all sounds in the pool that do not have explicit weight values assigned.

Sometimes you may want to have sounds included based on conditional events. You can add a condition to any sound and the sound pool will only include that sound if the condition evaluates to true at playback time. If the selection is random, excluded events will not be weighted in the distribution. If the selection is sequential, excluded events will simply be skipped.

sound_pools:
  triangle:
    type: random
    track: sfx
    sounds:
      - triangle_01
      - triangle_02{current_player.triangles_found>1}|2
      - triangle_03{current_player.triangles_found>2}
      - triangle_04{device.achievements.supertriangle.state=="complete"}|5
This example is tested to be valid MPF config. However, it is not integration tested.
sound_pools:
  triangle:
    type: random
    track: sfx
    sounds:
      - triangle_01
      - triangle_02{current_player.triangles_found>1}|2
      - triangle_03{current_player.triangles_found>2}
      - triangle_04{device.achievements.supertriangle.state=="complete"}|5

Sound conditions are formatted the same as all conditional events. Any sound in a pool can have a weight, a condition, both, or neither.

For additional sound pool setting options, take a look at the sound_pools documentation.

4. Configuring the sound player

We have our sounds and sound pool configured. To trigger the sounds with MPF events, the sound player can be used. The sound player was covered in the previous tutorial and will not be covered again here. You can also read the sound_player documentation.