How to Play Randomized Sounds Using Sound Cues in Unreal Engine 5

In today’s quick tutorial, we’ll dive into how to play randomized sounds using sound cues in Unreal Engine 5. This can be useful if, let’s say, you have an FPS project and when you shoot a bullet, you don’t want the same wood-breaking sound playing over and over again. Instead, you can randomize it a little bit so it doesn’t get stale. The same logic can be applied to footstep sounds as well. While there are ways to implement this via Blueprints, it adds unnecessary overhead to the project and isn’t the professional way to do it. Unreal Engine already has a built-in system that allows us to randomize sounds very easily. Without dragging it out too much, let's get right into it.

Crete a Sound Cue

Right-click in the "Content Browser" and select "Audio > Audio Cue". Open the cue, then drag and drop all of your sound effects here. Bring in a Random node so the cue knows it should switch between these sound files whenever the sound cue is called. Additionally, we can also add a Modulator node to randomize pitch and stuff.

And that’s it! Now all you need to do is call this cue in your Blueprint via Play Sound at Location, Play Sound 2D, or other similar nodes. Or, if you have many actors in your Blueprint, you can learn how to implement an Interface to play sounds based on what you hit by following this tutorial.

If you have any questions regarding this topic, or if you’d like to see more written tutorials like this, feel free to reach out to me here.