The vibration, sound radiation and transmission characteristics of plates with various functionally graded materials (FGM) are explored and a detailed investigation is presented on the influence of specific material properties on structural-acoustic behavior. An improved model based on a simplified first order shear deformation theory along with a near-field elemental radiator approach is used to predict the radiated acoustic field associated with a given vibration and acoustic excitation. Various ceramic materials suitable for engineering applications are considered with aluminum as the base metal. A power law is used for the volume fraction distribution of the two constitutive materials and the effective modulus is obtained using the Mori-Tanaka homogenization scheme. The structural-acoustic response of these FGM plates is presented in terms of the plate velocity, radiated sound power, sound radiation efficiency for point and uniformly distributed load cases. Increase in both vibration and acoustic response with increase in power law index is observed for the lower order modes. The vibro-acoustic metrics such as root-mean-squared plate velocity, overall sound power, frequency averaged radiation efficiency and transmission loss, are used to rank these materials for vibro-acoustically efficient combination. Detailed analysis has been made on the factors influencing the structural-acoustic behavior of various FGM plates and relative ranking of particular ceramic/metal combinations. © 2015 Imperial College Press.