Allow me to follow-up on a few of your points.

Regarding interactive music. I fully support the concept and do find it useful in certain applications like the new rhythm games on DS and/or some of the procedural elements in Spore. But as a composer I also evaluate the sheer quality (production/sound/composition) of the compositions and the results from interactive music just ain’t there yet.

Don’t get me wrong. I am probably deeper into adaptive music then most people and was fascinated by it for many years both in an academic and professional context - and I do believe it is the one type of contextual application that can truly elevate our art-form, but it must be followed by the quality and thats where its currently failing.

The reason I am hesitant about it is that its one of the most frequently mentioned highlights in the games industry. I am sure you have all read about the new and amazing adaptive scores, but how many times have you encountered one?

My point is put attention on the quality of the game music - not its technical implementation. I still believe game music is caught in the days of “bleeps and blobs” and the industry is truly missing a talent mass compared to features.

I am excited to see people like HGW, Debney, Giacchino and others in the games industry and they set the quality bar we should be at IMO.

Anyway … I am prolly rambling here …

To Nicks point I totally agree that its NOT all about orchestral music - and the possibilities for adaptive scoring are probably higher outside the orchestral realm and I do believe we will see VSTi based technologies on the PS4 and MS1080 for more electronica based types of scores. I would imagine that a .REX based format will be introduced and used in a variety of new rhythm games - where people can shape rhythms as a part of the gameplay feature set.

I am currently experimenting with a variety of .REX based technologies to test pipelines for how this might work out - and I know others are doing the same, so this will happen for sure.

But it still doesn’t solve the question of quality and the spirit of any composition. I totally agree with Nick that it is about getting the right people together - like getting Eno on Spore for example.

On an entirely other note I was totally surprised by the success of Guitar Hero. I think it is a brilliant game, but the fact it made over a billion $ for Activision was a big surprise to me, which I guess speaks to the interest of involving players with music creation - adaptive or not.

Let’s take a futuristic racer a la WipeOut for example (of course this particular one is licensing tracks, but that’s not the point). In this case, the current gen (well, actually the so-called next-gen) certainly allows for realtime generation of a few electronic instruments and playback of drum samples. It would be possible to make the soundtrack evolve depending on the stage of race, if you drove very well for a given time, if you were close to a competitor, or just got hit and were starting again, if you were almost destroyed etc…

In other games, it’s also possible to compose an adaptive score with a very few selected “acoustic” instruments, especially with a clever loading scheme. There is enough memory for that.

To be honest, I think people are the weakest link here. What it requires is the right producer, audio programmer and musican on the game, who are all pushing in the right direction. I also agree that the good examples are lacking, which is a shame really.

By the way, great percussion demo on your web site !

But then I don’t think, fundamentally, the medium of interactive music is at fault — for all the reasons you cite here. Even outside of games, there are necessary bits missing. To be honest, as a younger composer I didn’t have any interest in algorithmic music. I wanted to say, what’s the point of that? Why don’t I just write down this score one way and give it to my musicians? Now that I see new venues for music, not just games but even going onstage with a laptop, I feel differently. I just feel like there are musical ideas that could be expressed by music that is generated on the spot in a way that something that’s pre-composed might not be — maybe not for everything, but as an added tool for composers.

I have to think, too — imagine it’s the year 1750, and you asked if anybody had heard a good string quartet. Haydn hasn’t written the classics of the genre. Mozart hasn’t been born yet. No one really knows what a great string quartet is even supposed to sound like. The best players are all yet to come. There was some amazing music you could have heard then, so I don’t think string quartets are necessarily *better*. They’re just different, and it took time to work out what to do with them. It’s easy to see that in hindsight … less so in foresight. (and sure enough, before Haydn you had people dismissing these new-fangled gamba replacements that only the gypsies played…)

That’s just a different instrumentation — not even a particularly radical one at that. So, I guess the bottom line is, maybe these scores aren’t written yet. And maybe it could happen tomorrow — even if it means low-quality samples or (as in Spore) real-time synthesis. Maybe it won’t be in 2008, for the reasons you illustrate here, but at this point I’m even interested to hear some of the attempts that *aren’t* fully successful, because I think they could be a sign of what’s to come.

Regarding compositional quality it is a subjective thing, however there are some known quantities that we can define in this discussion.

A truly “adaptive/interactive” score can only be done using traditional short “midi” samples, which naturally sets a limitation to the possibilities and quality of any given score. The reason is that any real-time generation of music will need actual samples to trigger and knowing the sparse limitations of RAM budgets on consoles like 360, PS3 and Wii - there is no way we can introduce quality samples to that pipeline yet. So if you want to make a truly adaptive soundtrack - you are gonna need to work it out with a small sub-set of low quality samples.

I personally don’t enjoy music created at that fidelity level regardless of the actual quality of the composition. The main reason being that the quality of the samples is too low and sets a variety of limitations to what the composer can do. I could never write orchestrations using the traditional set of 128 midi sounds. I normally have about 100 channels in my template for strings alone, so imagine the difference between 3-4 string sounds in your midi-box and a 1100 track template for orchestral composition.

So what is the alternative?

The alternative is pre-generated music generated in a studio environment allowing the composer to obtain an acceptable level in both sound and composition. Naturally the pre-generated music has its limitations, since its not real-time generated and therefor not adapt to the same degree as the “midi-based” scoring mentioned above.

If we look at the current game market - I have yet to see one truly real-time generated score thats got both a great sound and high level compositional quality. So I think we are far, far away from seeing any algorithmic type of compositions that provide deeper value to the listener.

Please feel free to send me any references of good algorithmic music, if you have any. Good being great sound and soulful composition.

Admittedly, I’m saying this without staring a deadline for a game in the face. I think it probably (ironically) takes more time to write a score that’s generative. But, perhaps separate from the grueling challenges of game dev pipelines, this is something composers will begin to tackle on their own.

First of all thanks for reading my blog. I am glad it can provide some insights and all your thoughts are of great interest to me.

Allow me to address a few of the topics discussed in this thread.

1. Regarding sample library size. The reference to 50GB of samples was mainly to suggest that any future platform will need to have realtime access to 50GB of samples. My total library is 16TB, but I have a constant stream of aprox. 50GB of samples on my renderfarm, so its not the size of the library - its the realtime access number. So I guess we are faced with two problems on this one. One being the sheer size of great orchestral libraries (TB) and another being the real-time streaming access to a pool of aprox. 50GB of sample files.

2. Regarding convolution reverbs. Convolution reverbs doesn’t really work for me anymore. The more I work in real halls - the more I realize the limitations of the convolutions. The first issue being that a convolution impulse is a single recording in a frozen matter of space and time, which is far from the real deal - where there is constant variation in the sound. The best example I can give is repeating the same sound over and over in a hall. Everytime you play something the reflection will sound different due to variance in the resonance of the room like air moving for example.

The temporary solution for me is going back to traditional type of verbs and mixing different types of convolutions to allow more complex types of reflection. Ideally somebody should create a convolution engine that allowed multiple convolutions at the same time and constant replacement of new impulse files to create more variance in the resonance.

Regarding DX/VST plugins in games. Its true that we have seen a few being used in games like Halo 3, however I doubt we will see a lot more during this generation of consoles. The challenge is a matter of resources and dedicated audio resources is generally down the chain of events. Don’t get me wrong. I would LOVE to see more VST based technologies in games, but I doubt we will see it in a major way before 2010/2011 where the next generation of consoles are introduced. Another serious issue also relates to RAM and streaming capabilities. We used to have 2MB of dedicated sound ram on the PS2 - and now we have something like might 30MB. How far does that take you in terms of samples? The good streaming engines in games allows 4-5 stereo multi-streams at maximum, so certainly limitations there too.

Regarding procedural music. We are seeing many interesting things happening in the landscape of algorithmic/procedural audio and music. I am personally not so interested in it, since there is a significant loss of quality with this type of music. The general argument is that procedural music will adapt to player preference, which is true in theory. The only issue is that there is a significant loss in fidelity and compositional quality when you take that route. So what would you rather have? An adaptive midi sound score - or a great beautiful soundtrack that got more limitations in terms of its adaptive capabilities.