Transitions are the key to making interactive music listenable. Without smooth transitions, the illusion of a game score being one constantly-shifting piece of music is lost. Individual Music Segments fitted together badly are jarring for the listener and break the realism of your game. To avoid these problems, Wwise allows you to customize the transitions between music objects and make them as seamless as possible.
A transition is meant to be a smooth bridge that occurs whenever one music object, called a source, stops playing and another, called a destination, begins. You can define transitions between individual segments, or between containers holding segments. Each transition is carried out automatically by Wwise according to properties you define in the Transitions tab of the Secondary Editor.
You can specify when a transition will take place and if fades will accompany it. You can also assign a musical passage called a transition segment to play during a transition.
 | Transition matrix. |
 | Transition Segment properties. |
 | Source and destination properties. |
Imagine you are making a block puzzle game. At any given time, your players experience one of two situations: the game is going well (blocks are being cleared rapidly) or the game is going badly (blocks are piling up). Naturally, you've had some cool music composed to reflect each of these situations, which you want to show off to its fullest. One way to do this is to make sure the transitions between these two sets of music sound natural and musical.
To meet the needs of your game, you could create a Music Switch Container called Puzzle Sounds, with two Music Playlist Containers, Calm and Panic. These containers would be linked to two game states, reflecting the in-game situations. Successful transitions between these two Playlist Containers would make the game's score compelling. The following illustration shows how these transitions could be implemented in game:
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In this case, the transitions between the Playlist Containers have been smoothed by the use of fade-in and fade-out curves. This makes the change from one container to another more gradual and natural, and avoids noisy artifacts.
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