Just back up! Back up! ... mind your business that's all ...

Received my first piece of peer feedback today. It gave the impression that I may have not explained clearly what this project is to entail ... so I begin this post with a slight step back. And a question:

"What is adaptive music?"

This article by Andrew Clark goes into some detail about how to define adaptive music. However, to effectively grasp this I am going to take a stab at how I perceive the concept.

The interest in computer game audio for me began with one of those early classics (early for me anyway :p) Final Fantasy 7. I loved that game. From the story, to the graphics, to the music, the whole experience drew me in to the make believe world.

When I first bought the game I had been spending time at my grans for a holiday. Ten years old and completely oblivious to pretty much everything. So I get the game, get into the living room where my Playstation was set up and start playing. Needless to say I played that game non-stop throughout that entire holiday and loved every minute of it. My parents however were not as enthusiastic. The main reason - "that awfully repetitive music".

Being only ten I thought it was just "the oldies" showing their age. How could the music in this awesome game be repetitive? I didn't notice anything, it was great! I did however go back and have a play of FF7 a year or 2 ago and damn... that's some repetitive music. Now that my ear has had another ten years to develop I begin to notice what my parents were on about. Sure the music changed when you had a battle, went to a different town or one of the major characters dies ( everyone must have played it by now ) but the music didn't just change, it was more a case of one track ending and another track beginning. This exact situation can be replicated quite easily by loading up your favourite mp3 player and occasionally skipping tracks. Certainly not adaptive music.

So far I took a dig at a game which is over ten years old - ten has seemed to crop up quite a bit in this post - and admittedly games that take the same approach are few and far between when "next-gen" is considered. That's not to say there are games out there that don't do it. Titles like Tony Hawks, Pure and Madden are exempt from this discussion as their music is generally comprised of a playlist containing popular, chart type singles. The games I'm targeting are the types of game that when you play it you're drawn in by either story or a specific game mechanic. Examples of these games are Gears of War, Dawn of War and God of War ( is it just me, or do gamers like war? ).

So, what is adaptive music? What I believe adaptive music to be is a form of playing music in a game that is as dynamic as say, an AI controlled bot in Counterstrike... or the procedural animation used in The Force Unleashed. The music is so unpredictable that even the composer is not too sure what the music will do next, but you can be sure that whatever it does will make sense and not be jarring to fellow audiophiles like myself.

The only effective example of this must be taken not from games, but from film. A similar media but definitely much more predictable and easily demonstrated as far as score is concerned. For this we turn to our pal Indy. Notice the subtle changes in the music to reflect the on screen action. Excellent examples of this are when he takes his gun out to find that it's empty, when "dad" gets the idea to chase the birds and when the focus rests on Indy at the end of the clip the main theme is effortlessly slipped in. This is the kind of subtlety that is missing in modern day computer games as far as in game music is concerned.

That's not to say that games are not trying to be more like films in terms of score, and call me stubborn but I don't think they are doing the beautiful music composed for them justice. I'll quickly draw upon another example here in the form of Mass Effect. Pretty well thought out and executed game, buggy in some places but where my beef with the game resides is from a situation that occurs frequently when I'm playing. So I run into a room full of bad guys, music ups its pace quite well to make things more exciting but .. oh .. I've killed the guys already and suddenly the music returns to its previous state. No warning, no fill, just instant duuun and calm again. It wasn't even on the beat.

Again I don't know if this is me being picky (which I know I am) but that just seemed to ruin it for me. This whole project is to be on ways of getting round the "mass effect" that games have on music. How ways can be developed to allow it to change as often and as subtly as the film composers have so masterfully succeeded in.

Hope that clears some stuff up :D

I'd Be Honoured!

Now, down to business.

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.

Pop Goes The Weasle

First blog of the ... well... ever. Hopfully subsequent blogs will have more substance but this is just a test. Look forward to future posts about my upcoming honours project.

Hello everyone in blog land! ( could that translate to Bland? Only time will tell ... )