Music for Games, Films, and other Visuals

Today was the first day of the full conference at GDC. I was thrilled to run into some colleagues, chat about the industry and to see some wonderful panel discussions. If you’ve never been to a large conference, I have to tell you, the possibilities are very daunting. You can schedule yourself solid from 9 am to 9 pm thrice over! Needless to say, I had to make some choices if I was going to be able to both see the panels I found interesting PLUS catch up with people I only have the opportunity to see at this one time of the year.

The morning started off with a keynote address by John Schappert, from Microsoft. He spoke about the burgeoning online game world. With the introduction of the next-gen series of game consoles, Wii, Xbox 360, and PS3, delivering content online has never been easier. Mr. Schappert’s goal is to democratize the process of making games, much like iTunes and other online services has done for the music world. Games made by individuals or small independent teams will now be available in the Xbox Live Marketplace. He also highighted the XNA developer’s toolkit as a great resource for anyone with a game idea that wants to do guerilla production.

After the keynote I ran into Berklee alum Dan Lehrich from Seven Studios. We met up at one of the best panels I’ve seen, on the topic of creating procedural music for the game Spore. Kent Jolly and Aaron McLean gave a rundown on how they are using Pure Data, an opensource audio and music programming environment, to create the generative music components used in parts of the game. Working with Brian Eno, they were able to develop some fascinating musical ideas. Kent started with a quick rundown of how they molded the PD environment to not only create generative music pieces but also to have the ability to select ideas that had a musical relevance. I’m hoping the GDC makes the audio transcript available. Here is a snapshot of the demonstration in PD. This isn’t a script from the game but rather what they used to demonstrate making generative music musical.

If you look closely at the generators you can see how they were able to get the generated music to fall into a given musical idea. Notice the weighting they can do to force a major, wholetone or minor scale. It was a very interesting way to algorithmically cause a musical scale! Aaron McLean went on to talk about programming the rules of counterpoint as stated by the master text by Fux which allows counter-melodies to be generated by the music engine. Very fascinating indeed!

This was interesting primarily because it was a lot of very technically minded creative people sitting around talking about music. Again and again on this trip I was reminded of the importance and relevance to being skilled not only in the technical areas of making games but also as a musician. The future is looking great, from my vantage point, for music and musicians!