Speaking of games, you can expect game production to start to attract the attention of musicians and web publishers. Whereas a few short years ago, targeting musicians might mean dangling rock club gigs or album sales, now a lot of those same music makers want to break into gaming, too.

Kongregate is a bit like public access, only on steroids and for games. The idea is this: get indie game makers in one place contributing games, then get lots of people playing those games, then support the system with ad revenue shared with the game makers. The model has grown rapidly, with millions of users and over 15,000 original games.

The newest project from Kongregate looks to connect artistic talent on projects, including musicians, composers, and sound designers wanting to work on game projects. The Collabs section will see artists and sound and music creators uploading their work to find collaborators. Initially, there’s a contest on, with competition for attention, cash, and studio prizes.

http://www.kongregate.com/collabs

The competition aside, this could be the beginning of a successful community for collaboration in the indie Flash gaming world. Assets are often uploaded under a Creative Commons license, and I see one of the top sounds draws on samples from Freesound.org. While career success is an obvious goal, the contributors so far appear to see sharing as a way to get there – in stark contrast to the model in the mainstream, big-business game industry. Quality is, of course, variable, but ask anyone in the game industry how to become successful and the answer is always make as much as you can. Getting work out there, even primitive, can be part of a learning process. So I’m eager to see what transpires as these kinds of communities grow.

There is an invariable comparison to Deviant Art – and you’ll see they’ve already begun to invade.

Oh yeah, and I quite like these glassy tendrils, rendered in Cinema 4D. Image (CC) Chaodeath. Now, make that run real-time. Or, erm, imagine those are virtual renderings of artists … collaborating.

Wired has a great mini-documentary on the score for the videogame Infamous. It’s chock full of sound design ear candy, not only served by the chops of composer Amon Tobin but the team at Sony Music and Sony’s entertainment division, as well. Curiously, Jonathan Mayer, Music Manager at SCEA, says explicitly that he doesn’t want composers writing interactive music. He’d prefer to have them write a conventional score and then adapt it to the interactive engine. Now, of course, around these parts we like the idea of composers finding ways to write genuinely generative and interactive scores. But in this case, Mayer is acting as a kind of remix artist for the game realm, sampling Tobin’s compositions and reconceiving them in the game world. That kind of collaboration could be powerful.

Chuck Doug, SCEA music director, overstates things a bit by claiming this game has a unique aesthetic. The visuals are a burnt-out, post apocalyptic city – yeah, been there quite a few times. The music involves lots of ethnic percussion-y instruments and bowed metal and deep booming sounds. (Let me get this straight: we’ll hear a plucky stringy thing, then a bowedy metally thing, then there will be a big boom!) So, generally, not some radical new departure from game and motion soundtracks. But regardless of its novelty, I’d be an utter killjoy to complain: it sounds utterly gorgeous.

Previously:

I got to listen in on a lot of gems regarding sound design from composer Troels Folmann. He doesn’t just bow metal instruments – he boils them.

GDC: Boiling Waterphones and Other Sonic Inspirations from Composer Troels Folmann

And on the subject of getting composers to write interactively, Matt Ganucheau has been teaching that way:

Teaching Adaptive Music with Games: Unity + Max/MSP, Meet Space Invaders!

Play this track:

Play this track:

Play this track:

Play this track:

Play this track:

Award-winning composer Troels Folmann has made a name as a video game composer on the likes of the Tomb Raider series, as well as espousing new ideas about adaptive music for games like his “micro-scoring” methodology. But speaking to a roomful of composers and sound designers at the recent Game Developer Conference, he turned to the topic of reinvention. Even having perfected signature sounds that keep him in demand on jobs like blockbuster feature trailer soundtracks, Troels challenged attendees to get out of their usual habits and comfort zones.

And that means torturing some instruments. No, really torturing them: breaking sticks, destroying drums, warping instruments, and boiling waterphones (putting the whole instrument on a stove).

Human beings, of course, shouldn’t be tortured – to get the best sound of them, you want to get them drunk. (I want the Drunken Eastern European Choir sample library, Troels!)

Speaking excitedly in run-on sentences that clipped one another – a bit like sample in and out points were set wrong – Troels revealed some of his latest sampling explorations and sonic secrets. It was, truly, one of the best talks I saw at GDC – and unquestionably the highest idea and inspiration – to – time ratio, even if you weren’t into sound. Here are some of the gems from that conversation, along with some of the lists of bizarrely-combined sampled instruments in recent compositions.

I was looking over my notes and wondering if I should polish them. But then, I realized that I had transcribed all the things Troels said that interested me. If I put them all in a jar, I could take any one idea out on a day when my musical reserves were dry and be inspired. So I’ll share them with you in exactly that form.

Game Audio: Selected Student Works from Matt Ganucheau on Vimeo.

In the early days of game sound, musical soundtracks were all largely adaptive and interactive, fused with the sound effects of the game and the logic of gameplay. Scores were less Alfred Newman or John Williams, more Spike Jones. Today, game music has the potential to reinvent composition itself, to help us reimagine what makes a musical score as on-screen user action drives musical ideas. But with a few, notable exceptions, most modern titles have opted for big, Hollywood-style soundtracks – and the linear composition that goes with them, as though someone just took a film score CD and hit play.

It’s one thing to talk about that in theory. Better yet: give it a shot yourself. So why not teach game music as its own discipline?

Matt Ganucheau, a composer, sound designer, and interactive developer/artist, is teaching just that, working with students at Expression College in Emeryville, California. The accelerated course works with the elegant Unity game engine and a clone of the legendary Space Invaders arcade game, adding music built in Max/MSP. If Max seems an unlikely choice, its open source cousin Pure Data (Pd) is actually integrated with the game engine for Electronic Arts’ Spore, with music by Brian Eno working with EA’s Kent Jolly and contributor Aaron McLeran. So, this could be the wave of the future. The first problem: figuring out how to actually compose.

The results are astonishing, given that the students were just learning Max and had extremely limited amounts of time. I asked Matt to write up for CDM how the coursework evolved; he shares his process and what he learned as a teacher. We’re also working on open sourcing the coursework content and the patches, which we’ll soon provide both for Pd and Max/MSP. I’m doing some work on the game side so that you can play with game mechanics in Processing. Stay tuned for more on that.

We spoke a bit about this process – and interactive music in general – with Xeni Jardin and Boing Boing in their Game Developer Conference livecast a week ago Friday. Edited video of that coming soon.

Here’s Matt on the coursework itself:

One chip to rule them all: over a quarter century later, the sounds of this chip are reborn in the newest mobile devices. Photo (CC) Dejdżer / Digga.

Take a look at the long view of history, and the Commodore 64 fares nicely. It remains the most popular computer of all time. And this newfangled iPhone thing? Well, it now just catches up to the C64, giving people what they really want – a C64-like music player in their pocket.

How else to explain my inbox packed with tips about the new SID Player for iPod Touch and iPhone? Who needs MP3 when there’s SID. A tiny download yields over 33,000 tracks, and the player application itself is open source. Rounding out this (unplanned) day of game music, this seems the appropriate coda.

Now, it’d be easy enough to let a wave of nostalgia wash over you – or, Scrooge-like naysayers, to dismiss yet another novelty download for iPhone. But consider if you will some of the underlying reasons a SID Player works:

• Composition: The compositions aren’t just nostalgia pieces – even classic game tunes like Commando and Arkanoid. The point is, composers like Rob Hubbard were inventive and ingeniously compact. Strip away the instrumentation, and they still work – something that can’t be said of a lot of modern game music (but can be said of hits like “Still Alive,” as it happens).
• Storing scores, not sound: We continue to be force-fed the idea that recorded music is superior to sequenced racks that are synthesized – but no one can say why. Sure, for simulating an orchestra, that makes some sense, even with increasingly sophisticated samplers. But for electronic compositions, it’s nonsense. You can pack more music and more musical structure into a score. If MIDI scores are underwhelming, it’s because the synths playing them, or the limitations of the file format, or both killed the idea.
• SID forever: The SID remains one of the great synth designs of all time, again, because of its economy and its personality. There’s no reason that success can’t be replicated in 2009 by DIY electronics builders on one hand, or smart synth programmers working on mobile and embedded devices on the other.

I have nothing against nostalgia on the one hand, and nothing against healthy skepticism on the other. But if you look at something like a 2009 SID player on the iPhone, there really is something to it – even when history washes both the SID and the iPhone into a forgotten past.

SID Player Project Page, iTunes link (US$2.99; further evidence that you can have a for-fee open source mobile app, folks)

Via Synthtopia and James Lewin’s Twitter and a few of you, as well.

The only way to top this iPhone app? Why, someone needs to build a SID-based pocket music player that does nothing else. There are a few DIY projects that might get you started.