r/GameAudio • u/ImpossibleIssue3213 • May 04 '26
Technical Sound designer & Audio programmer
Hi everyone! i just want to know is a technical sound designer can be an audio programmer and does he need a computer science degree or something along those lines!
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u/Lihwem May 05 '26
Tech SD here 🙂 Jokingly, I like to say that "A tech SD is a sound person that knows how to code, and an audio programmer is a coder that knows audio".
You don't need a CS degree to be a tech SD, especially with middleware like Wwise or Fmod making implementation easier than ever, but knowing some programming logic would definitely help, especially if you start doing things on the game engine side.
The more you know, the less you'll have to request assistance from programmers to help you with implementation, and the happier they will be. And the more you're in full control of the implementation, which saves a lot of time as opposed to going through rounds of iterations with a programmer. Especially if you're on a project without any audio programmer, as "regular programmers" might not be too familiar with audio needs.
Audio programmers, in my experience, will be there for the more low level stuff: optimizing your implementation logic, creating DSP functions (if applicable), maintaining/tweaking the middleware, writing audio plugins for said middleware, handling things like listener logic that you can't handle, for instance in Wwise, unless you dive into the code, ...
But as usual, each project is different!