I am planning the development of a game in Unity3D, and trying to come to terms with what the engine has already provided, and what I must code myself.

The game itself is going to be a rhythm game, which means synching audio and graphical events so that they always play when they're supposed to. What I'm looking to avoid is a potential scenario of lag where either the audio or the graphics starts to progress faster than the other.

When we discussed this type of coordinating system in my game design class back at university, my professor called this type of design a "Timeline" class. The idea being that you can instantiate one or more of these to progress at different rates, schedule things to happen in the future, and synch up periodic events. However, calling this a "Timeline" class seems to have been limited to my professor himself, as googling for whether a certain API features "Timeline" functionality has been a fruitless endeavor.

Is there some more common name for this kind of functionality? Does Unity have any pre-existing methods to coordinate the scheduling of events like this, or is this the kind of thing that needs to be built onto the engine? And if it does, I'd appreciate being pointed towards some tutorials!