Volunteer Audio Engineer / Technical Sound Designer — Games & AI Dialogue Simulations

Design immersive audio scapes, clean dynamic voice dialogue, and implement interactive sound systems for serious games and conversational AI simulations that foster constructive dialogue across differences.

Crossing Party Lines is seeking a detail-oriented, creative Audio Engineer / Sound Designer to join our Apps and Agents team. Sound plays an essential role in setting emotional safety, lowering defensiveness, and building presence during difficult conversations. In this role, you will design environmental audio for simulated settings (such as city council chambers, family living rooms, and workplace boardrooms), optimize synthetic and recorded speech assets, and integrate dynamic audio cues that respond to live conversational tension and player choices.

About the Apps and Agents Team

Our team blends modern generative AI models and multi-agent systems with Crossing Party Lines’ proprietary frameworks developed through nearly a decade of moderating real-world political discourse. As we prepare an application to Y Combinator and expand our interactive role-play modules, thoughtful audio design ensures our simulations feel alive, grounded, and emotionally resonant rather than clinical or game-y.

What You’ll Do

• Design and implement ambient soundscapes, background room tones, UI audio feedback, and subtle score cues for browser-based 3D simulations and serious games.
• Process, clean, EQ, and normalize dialogue audio—including recorded voiceovers and synthetic AI text-to-speech (TTS) outputs—to ensure seamless clarity and tonal consistency.
• Implement dynamic, state-driven audio behavior (e.g., adaptive volume Ducking, tension shifts, room acoustics/reverb) using Web Audio API, Howler.js, or middleware like FMOD/Wwise where applicable.
• Collaborate with Game Developers and UI/UX Designers to embed responsive sonic feedback that guides players without distraction.
• Work with narrative writers and prompt designers to align sonic pacing with narrative beats, active listening milestones, and de-escalation moments.
• Test and optimize audio performance across devices and browsers to maintain rapid load times and low memory consumption.

You May Be a Good Fit If You

• Have experience in game audio design, post-production mixing, or technical sound design using modern DAWs (e.g., Reaper, Ableton Live, Pro Tools, Logic Pro).
• Understand the technical constraints of web audio integration (compression formats like Opus/WebM/MP3, asset preloading, latency reduction, Web Audio nodes).
• Possess an intuitive grasp of how sonic frequency, volume, and pacing impact human emotional state and conversational anxiety.
• Bring an open, curious mindset comfortable collaborating across diverse viewpoints and interdisciplinary disciplines.
• Prior experience with speech synthesis tools (ElevenLabs, Coqui, Whisper), interactive audio middleware (FMOD, Wwise), or Three.js audio listeners is a plus.

What You’ll Gain

• Published audio and technical sound design credits on functional AI-driven serious games and civic simulators.
• Hands-on experience integrating procedural and dynamic sound systems with real-time generative AI pipelines.
• Direct collaboration with developers, narrative writers, game artists, and depolarization researchers.
• Professional references recognizing your technical audio engineering and production contributions.