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A Truly UserFriendly Game Audio Engine?
dallen writes "Do you wonder what Illiad of UserFriendly does when he's not coming up with comics? This article at GlobeAndMail.com reveals that his company, Condition30, is working on multiple videogame-related engines which create unpredictable but recognizable content. The company is working 'to polish its game-engine technology', but its public demo, a music creation engine, makes 'random' music that sounds much like music, not noise, potentially for games and other interactive products. Says their website: 'Our principal product, ZenStrings, is a music-generation engine that composes music and audio in real-time without taxing memory or processing power'."
This is exacly why you should be talking to a real musician! Creating variations on a theme to induce emotions, keeping a long piece of music sounding fresh with different arrangments, and so on are all things that musicians already know how to do.
If your spec if for a 72 hour responsive soundtrack that doesn't take up a lot of space, working with a musician and a tracker style sample/note playback system with some mildly clever arpeggiators is going to be a very good way to do it.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Yes, but the better ones won't work for free; if the game goes commercial or shareware or whatever, they'll want a cut. This program, on the other hand, is quite willing to work for a bit of electricity and some spare processor cycles. Whether it can produce music equivalent to that of a good musician\composer is another matter entirely, but this does show that it can be done.
--- Bwah?
I agree that the slight changes may keep things fresh, but space for music is really not that big of a deal anymore. You can store dozens of hours of reasonable quality audio on a 700MB CD-ROM and none of it may be worth a damn, regardless of whether it is fresh.
The parent to your post said, "hire a musician". I don't think the RIAA comment helped the argument, but the poster was onto something; there is an aspect in music composition that arpeggiating algorithms can appease and extend to some extent, but there is always something lacking that results from the rigidity of purely mathematical constructions. After listening to many of the sample tracks , I think they are on to something of a middle ground that may work out rather well. Here's why:
I listened to all the available sample tracks. Some were quirky, some were rather interesting, but none of the demos developed a hook. When it comes right down to it, they all were ambient and lacking melodic recurrence to draw me into the piece (no offense intended to the composer). That hook will bring you back (thanks JP).
But these were merely the demos. They are creating this software with the idea that it will end up in the hands of a (hopefully) talented melodic composer that will provide exactly what you may be looking for, (i.e. I think): reduction of time/space/money/whathaveyou in the composition process, while creating an original theme that is still humanistic in its structure and delivery, resulting in a memorable and likeable melody that holds your attention over the long haul.
Or the are just using sax and violins to sell games?
"When it comes right down to it, they all were ambient and lacking melodic recurrence to draw me into the piece"
Thats generally what most video games are going for. Of course we all know the super mario bros theme by heart, but for a shooter game the ambience is there to fill the silence (except when needed for suspence), without being so distracting you can't get in the game. Imagine trying to shoot a nazi while some annoying teen is singing. Now kill that same nazi while you have a faint ambient song going in the background. Of course there are exceptions (see any grand theft auto-like game or a game like tony hawk). Really depends on the game I suppose.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
72 hours of music is going to take far, far more space than 2 hours of music, and is why we only have 2 hours of music. That's the point of this whole thing. I understand you're point though - you're concerned that musicians are missing out on this. Well, I doubt it.
But it sounds pretty random to me. Yes, it's more coherant than pure random notes, but it has a long way to go.
That's where you are wrong. There are LOADS of really amazing hobby musicians out there who would really like the opportunity to get their music into a game for no fee at all.
The problem is that none of the have a high enough profile for you to hear about them, so you need to go and look for them - which is the point I was trying to make in my original post. Raising their profile to ther point where they get noticed is the hardest part for a musician who wants to give away their music, so being associated witha good game would be a wonderful opportunity for them.
BTW, algoryhtmic composition is not a new concept, you can trace the idea right back to Mozart's musical dice game from 1787, this is just the first one that I have heard about that has been marketed to the games industry. I guess the fact that so many people are assuming this is a new thing reinforces my point that there is not enough crossover between the two fields?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a