The topic in which I have chosen to study as part of my honours project is one of the audio variety. Adaptive music in computer games. Even in recent "next-gen" games I still find myself being presented with jarring transitions between, say, the generic "battle theme" switching back to the "overworld theme". This example, albeit now a rare occurrence is something that I feel is unacceptable considering modern processing capabilities.
Without delving too much into the specifics - gotta keep something for the dissertation :P - here is a list of issues surrounding this topic that I intend to investigate as I described in "project worksheet #1" :
Why should music need to adapt in a game environment?
Difficulties in creating seamless transitions and passages.
Technical/artistic/cost constraints in producing adaptable game scores.
How music in film and television fits the on screen context in ways that games currently do not.
How can various algorithms be applied to enable musical to dynamically tailor itself to the current situation? (e.g. Beat detection, time stretching etc.)
How adaptive music has previously been used in games and how modern technology can improve on these initial developments.
These issues have not been set in stone as I'm still in the early stage of development and I want to obtain as much feedback as possible. Already I have been given several suggestions on improving the quality of this project, one of which being to maybe look into how adaptive music affects the content creator. This presents the question "are current audio generation tools up to the task?" and can they cope with the demand put upon the composer. This is certainly something I would want to pursue as it takes the findings and applys them to real life situations making this project more relevant to today.
To summarise - Gee, blogging sure is hard work - a week in to the project and already I've been presented with different ways to approach this topic. I only hope that when the time comes I'll be confident enough to say "this is what my project is about" and hopfully have enough time left to produce something that I am proud of.
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