Sounds are not properly balanced

Please have a look at MCPE-49613. Does it go away if you turn off Spatial Sound (in the taskbar Volume Control icon right-click menu)?

I have spatial sound turned off

Ok, we'll keep this as a separate ticket then. Thanks!

The worst offender by far is thunder lightning, it is ridiculously loud. The throwing sound for 🔱 is also ridiculously loud. The 🔱 is loud because it originates next to your head and, in general, there is far too much dynamic difference between sounds that are close and sounds that are far away. That’s also why your own steps are so loud. However, some sounds like thunder lightning and (I think) ghast noises have no distance factor but are not balanced against those that do. Ghasts aren’t too bad but thunder lightning seems to be at max volume, so it’s like it is occurring inside your ear.

(Edited to correct references to thunder when I meant the lightning explosion sound.)

The 1.16.0.57 changelog states:

• A large amount of sounds have had their volume and pitch slightly changed...

I though maybe this meant an attempt was made to fix this bug. Could we get some specific feedback from beta testers?

There does appear to be a massive difference between 1.14.60 and 1.16.0.57 and is huge step in the right direction.

There might be a few sounds that are still off but overall its in a much better place. Massive props to the team.

Oh, joy!

Even though some sounds were altered, all nether specific blocks except magma blocks, gravel, blackstone (and variants) and glowstone seem to be equal to Java values. In terms of pitch, breaking or placing anything will have a noticeably higher pitch than in 1.14.60 (even the Nether Update blocks).

By the way, here's the report about ghast sounds, if it's not a backwards duplicate: MCPE-35222.

I've been encountering this issue with volume balancing too and after some investigation made some interesting observations:

1. The sound of punching wood right in your face is almost twice as loud as standing inside TNT when it explodes. The sound of ultimately breaking the wood while punching it is VERY quiet.

2. The 3D position of the sound effect of breaking a block is coming from the CORNER of the block, not the centre. I'm not sure exactly which corner, but it's the same corner for every block, likely a 0,0 coordinate of some kind.

3. This is not a surround sound issue. I did a bunch of testing and the volume balance does not change based on surround settings or speaker positioning, it's definitely specific sound effects misbehaving and it seems to primarily be effects which were non-3D positional in Java which have been made 3D positional in Bedrock.

Hopefully that helps narrow down what the issues are so they can get fixed!

The corner issue is being tracked at MCPE-60799.

Just a bit of information on ghasts:

For some reason, ghast sound drop off over distance is very low. This means ghasts will likely sound the same or similar when going at survival speeds (walking, sprinting, flying with an elytra, or more related). The vanilla resource pack's sound.json file set all ghasts sounds to 600.0 volume, but this does not determine how loud the ghast actually is. It instead determines the distance where the sound will be completely cut off, not lowering the actual drop off at all. The equation for this is the following:

volume * 16 = sound distance

Anyone within that radius will have sounds play internally, no matter if the sound drop off permits it or not. However, that number for ghasts is way too high anyway. If my calculations are correct, that would mean that ghast sounds only cut off when the player is 9600 blocks away. To confirm this, running the command /summon ghast ~ ~-5000 ~ will still play ghast sounds. At this distance however, it's kind of hard to hear, but the fact that someone can hear it is likely not intended by Mojang.

The furthest playing sound in the game is lightning, coming in a volume level of 1000.0, making it heard from 16000 blocks away (very close to the distance where world rendering begins to fail). Being able to hear a ghast from well over half of that distance is definitely inconsistent.

The 1.16.0.63 changelog includes the line

Fixed issue where sounds would sometimes have incorrect settings applied to them leading to 2D sounds to play as 3D and vice versa

I wonder if this helps with some of the issues covered in this report?

Most of the issues mentioned have been fixed for me in recent 1.16 betas.

The raid horn sound is still obnoxiously loud compared to anything else. It actually creates family conflict in my house because if someone is playing on the Switch and gets a raid the sound is disruptive to others (such as those working from home due to COVID and on a work call) and the player gets scolded repeatedly. But if you turn the volume down for a raid then everything else is much too quiet.

EDIT: the raid horn volume in 1.16 is being tracked at MCPE-85593.

In general I’d say the drop-off for most directional sounds is still too much (with a few exceptions like Ghasts), and/or directionality is too intense. It would be nice to have a compression setting or directional intensity mixer to blend directional with flat/mono sound output.

Resolving as Fixed based on changes made in 1.16.0. For ongoing issues please follow the open tickets already linked as "related" or search or create new reports for specific sound issues.