Adaptive Soundtracks

View blog entry: Adaptive Soundtracks – Twilight Lynk

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As soon as i started to read i thought of the music in Twilight Princess as you have talked to me about how the music changed in it before XP I remember i didn't even know the music was in MIDI format before you told me XD
Maybe someone will create a new sound format like MIDI in the future

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I usually don't pay much attention to the music when playing, It doesn't always have the same effect as it does in movies. Sometimes the music is irritating, for example in Metal Gear Solid, as you mentioned has typical suspense music when the alarm goes off, which makes me even more alert/scared/stressed. Which is exactly how Hideo wanted me to react I guess Anyway, atmospheric/ambient music is great which does have It's effect on the mood and setting of the game, for example: the "Flood" level in Halo has dark music right from the start which builds up, you instantly know that something is going to happen.

So far the best soundtrack I've come across is Command & Conquers'. Frank Klepacki is a great composer, and the songs fit the atmosphere of the game perfectly. Here are a few samples:

YouTube - Frank Klepacki - Hell March

YouTube - Frank Klepacki - Industrial

YouTube - Command & Conquer OST, T01: Act On Instinct

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I definitely like to see videogame soundtracks evolving so that the music matches the gameplay. I think it just makes it a more immersing experience. I notice that World of Warcraft has different music when you enter different areas but besides that its just looping a track for that area for the most part. I'd like to see some improvement though the music itself is pretty good.

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MIDI is less a set of sounds than it is a set of triggers for when samples of sounds occur. You can attach any samples you want to the triggers, from the beeps and boops of 8-bit games to the rich orchestration of more modern games. If the music is unnatural or inorganic sounding, it's the fault of the samples themselves and not the MIDI triggers that cue them. (i.e., it is distinctly possible to have the best of both worlds...depending, of course, on the development budget...orchestration is a hell of a lot more expensive to record than a set of basic, standard samples. Even resampling is more costly than just using prerecorded, looped material.)

If we've reached the point where sound effects are cued with relation to player distance and direction-from-object or -enemy, (perfect examples of this being the power-ups in the Metroid Prime series, where the sound cues helped eliminate the need to use the x-ray visor to find most hidden objects , or the similar case of the Lovikov balls in No More Heroes) then it's most certainly high time that developers pay attention to making the music just as flexible and reactive. It can only improve the depth and tension of the gaming experience, which for series like Metal Gear and Zelda is a massive payoff for all the patience we've spent on them.

There is some amazing music hidden in video games; I give a lot of credit to the composers who helped define our game experiences from the very beginning of the genre/art form/industry until now. But I would love to see John Williams-scale interaction and complexity regardiing the soundtrack, with the repetition of key themes appropriate to the area, the enemies, items...the possibilities for combination and recombination really are as endless as the amount of choices the player has at any given moment in the game.

From this perspective, the future seems pretty bright =)

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Exactly, but what I was suggesting was the complexity of the use of MIDI rather than the sample quality. But of course, the sample quality from a Nintendo 64 game and the sample quality from a PS3 game will obviously be extremely different mostly due to do with the fact that the Nintendo 64 has vast limitations compared to the PS3. Sure, if you made a dedicated piece of software where all it did was play MIDI tracks, you could get that N64 to sound very close to the PS3 version, but it's about the whole game in its entirity, not the individual components.

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