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It has been shown that in typical cases, sounds that have large level differences such as an impact sound that ranges from 0 dB to -96 dB should not drive the HDR window for their whole duration, but should instead do so only during a limited period of time. The rationale for this comes from the following paradox: HDR acts as a priority system based on loudness, but the softer parts of a loud sound should not be given as much importance. For example, the decaying tail of a grenade sound has very low importance compared to the transient, and thus should not cover up the impact of a shotgun, even though the former is technically louder, on an absolute scale. In this case, the region of interest of the grenade sound should be limited to its first impact. It moves the HDR window up and therefore ducks everything else. On the other hand, once in the tail and playing say, 12 dB below the peak value, it is usually not desired to continue ducking the other sounds, even if the grenade's volume minus 12 dB is still above the level of all the other sounds in the audio scene. Restricting the HDR window control to a region of interest can be regarded as a way of gracefully blending together various "tonal regions" to continue with the HDR imaging analogy.

In Wwise, the way to define the region of interest is to declare a range in decibels from the peak of the sound, the active range. When the sound's envelope drops below the active range, the sound is considered outside of its region of interest, and is not considered by the HDR system as being able to drive the HDR window. Figure 30.15, “Active range” illustrates this with three similar sounds having different active ranges.

Figure 30.15. Active range

The same decaying sound is played three times with active range set to 96 dB, 12 dB and 6 dB respectively, above a steady background sound. When the sound drops by that amount of decibels below its peak, the window stops following it and instead releases back to idle. The movement of the window distinctly affects the level of the background sound. On the other hand, the window or active range has no impact on the decaying sound itself.