DirectSound 3D Listeners
[The feature associated with this page, DirectSound, is a legacy feature. It has been superseded by WASAPI and Audio Graphs. Media Casting have been optimized for Windows 10 and Windows 11. Microsoft strongly recommends that new code use Media Casting instead of DirectSound, when possible. Microsoft suggests that existing code that uses the legacy APIs be rewritten to use the new APIs if possible.]
In a virtual 3D environment as in the real world, sounds exist only in relation to a point of reception. The 3D sound effects in a DirectX application are affected not only by the position, orientation, and velocity values of the sound sources, but also by the position, orientation, and velocity of the virtual listener.
By default, the listener is stationary at the zero point of all vectors, oriented with the nose toward the positive Z-axis and the top of the head toward the positive Y-axis. The application can change all these values to reflect the movement and facing of the user within virtual space. The listener object also controls the general parameters of the acoustic environment, such as the amount of Doppler shift and the rate of volume attenuation over distance.
This section describes how your application can obtain a listener object and manage global 3D sound parameters. The following topics are discussed: