Sword & Sworcery, the iPad album-as-game, has gotten plenty of love from this site before, and recognition for friend-of-the-site composer Jim Guthrie. (See Jim open up about what happened behind the scenes.)

Now, it seems the Canadian songwriter and soundmaker will meet up with some of the biggest game composers from Japan in a unique remix album. In the lineup:

Michiru Yamane (Castlevania: Symphony of the Night)
Akira Yamaoka (Silent Hill)
Baiyon (PixelJunk 4am)
Mitsuto Suzuki (Final Fantasy XIII-2)
macotom3 (JP chip music artist)
Decasségui Hip

The release will be on iTunes and Bandcamp – the new havens for the indie artist (and certainly for game music).

It’s terrific to see this cross-cultural, international fusion. And the preview clips released, while brief, should whet the appetite of fans of musical invention in the game medium. Have a listen below.

Preview tracks:

00:00 Little Furnace (00:15 PostProduction Mitsuto Suzuki Mix) Mitsuto Suzuki
00:37 The Ballad of the Space Babies (00:52 Supernova Babies Mix) macotom3
01:14 Lone Star (01:30 Baiyon Just Walking Remix) Baiyon
01:54 The Maelstrom (02:09 Radiant Darkness Mix) デカセギ・ヒップ
02:32 The Prettiest Weed (02:48 *’s Ambition Remix) デカセギ・ヒップ
03:10 Unknowable Geometry (03:27 Symphony Mix) 山根ミチル
03:48 Bones McCoy (04:04 Akira Yamaoka Mix) 山岡晃

The remix project coincides with the Japan release for Sword & Sworcery. Remember, kids, localization is the future of everything. Teaser for that:

More:
http://sworcery.jp/remix/

As musical old-timers repeatedly sing the sad song of the supposed demise of the full-length album, a funny thing has happened. Lovers of games have taken up a growing passion for game music, and in particular the indie score for indie games. Independent game publishing and independent music composition – from truly unsigned, unknown artists – go hand in hand. Indeed, the download and purchase charts on Bandcamp are often dominated by game scores. Fueled by word-of-mouth, these go viral in enthusiast communities largely ignored by either music or game reportage.

Far from the big-budget blockbuster war game, these scores – like the games for which they’re composed – are quirky and eccentric. They reject the usual expectations of what game music might be, sometimes tending to the cinematic, sometimes to the retro, sometimes unapologetically embracing magical, sentimental, childlike worlds.

And now, defying music’s typical business models as well as its genre expectations, you can get a whole big bundle of games for almost no money. Pay what you want, and get hours of music. Pay more than $10, and get loads more. You just have to do it before the deal ends (five days from this posting), at which point the bundle is gone forever. In a sign of just how much love listeners of these records feel, there’s a competition to get into the top 20, top 10, and top-paying spots, which with days left in the contest is already pushing well into the hundreds of dollars. But for that rate or just the few-dollar rate, these are the true fans. You’ve heard about them in theory in trendy music business blogs and conferences, in theory. But here, someone’s doing something about it, and it’s not a fluke or a one-time novelty: it’s a real formula.

http://www.gamemusicbundle.com/

Game music itself is, of course, a funny thing. Game play itself tends to repetition, meaning you hear this music a lot. So it says something really extraordinary about the affection for these scores that gamers want to hear the music again and again. This gets the musical content well beyond the level of annoying wallpaper into something that, even more than a film score you hear just once or a few times, you want to make part of your life. That endless play gets us back to what inspired ownership in the first place, to buying stacks of records rather than just waiting for them on the radio. And in that sense, perhaps what motivates owning music versus treating it like a utility or water faucet hasn’t changed in the digital age at all. Maybe it’s gotten even stronger.

We’ve already sung the praises of Sword and Sworcery on this site; it’s notably in the bundle. But I want to highlight in particular one other score, the inventive and dream-like Machinarium. Impeccably recorded, boldly original, the work of Prague-based Tomáš Dvořák, Machinarium mirrors the whimsical constructed machines of the games. There’s a careful attention to timbre, and music that moves from film-like moments to song to beautiful washes of ambience, glitch set against warm rushes of landscape. For his part, Dvořák is a clarinetist, and his musical senstitivity never ceases to translate into the score. It’s just good music, even if you never play the game, and easily worth the price of admission for the bundle if you never listened to anything else (though you would truly be missing out). It’s simply one of the best game music scores in recent years.

And another look at Jim Guthrie’s score to Sword & Sworcery:

Game Meets Album: Behind the Music and Design of the iPad Indie Blockbuster Swords & Sworcery[Create Digital Music]

Game Meets Album: Behind the Music and Design of the iPad Indie Blockbuster Swords & Sworcery [Create Digital Motion]

Also in this collection: Aquaria, To the Moon, Jamestown, and a mash-up, plus a whole bunch of bonus games when you spend a bit more that feel heavily influenced by Japanese game music and chip music.

And some of the best gems are in the repeat of the last bundle, which you can (and should) add on for US$5 more:
Minecraft: Volume Alpha, Super Meat Boy: Digital Soundtrack, PPPPPP (soundtrack to VVVVVV), Impostor Nostalgia, Cobalt, Ravenmark: Scourge of Estellion, A.R.E.S. Extinction Agenda, Return All Robots!, Mighty Milky, Way / Mighty Flip Champs, Tree of Knowledge

I’ve sat at game conferences as composers working for so-called AAA titles lamented the limitations of the game music production pipeline. Quietly, indie game developers have shown that anything is possible, that the quality of a game score is limited only by a composer’s imagination.

More music to hear (and some behind-the-scenes footage), including a really promising Kickstarter-funded iPad music project from regular CDM reader Wiley Wiggins:

Game lovers may lap up anything the title Portal touches as though it’s covered in powdered sugar, but resident Valve Software composer Mike Morasky deserves special mention. His music for Portal, and now Portal 2, is dead-on: chilly, atmospheric, dystopian, but also pulsing with energy and able to capture the gaming blockbuster’s strange combination of diabolical cerebral puzzles with wit. It’s all the more impressive, as Morasky has straight-up parodied musical styles in his whimsical Team Fortress or horror movie-cinematic Left 4 Dead scores.

Developer Valve quietly released 22 instrumental tracks from Portal 2 as “Soundtrack Volume 1: Songs to Test By,” free in 320 kpbs MP3 form. “Music to Code By” could be just as appropriate. Even if you ignore this post, know that this score will be racking up Last.fm playcount as it pipes into the headphones of nerd boys and girls.

GamesRadar published an interview with Morasky. Interestingly, while this is being released in soundtrack form, Portal 2 is in fact adaptive in the game. The system is in the foreground only in a few scenes, but there, multiple layers give a sense of progression. Any musicians who have been … erm … sucked into this game no doubt found these scenes highlights already, but here’s Morasky’s explanation to GamesRadar:

There are several cases where the music adds channels and complexity as you successfully solve portions of the puzzle, with each additional piece of music actually coming from the device that is participating in the activated game play mechanic. Obviously, this can heighten the sense of achievement as one completes the puzzle but also turns the mechanics of the puzzle into a sort of interactive music instrument that you can explore by selectively triggering the different channels of music with differing timings and configurations. Most of the interactive music is also positional so that as you move through the space you also change the mix and volume of the music you are hearing, which invites explorations of the space as well.

Morasky and Valve have been at the forefront of adaptive music in games – an area still left surprisingly unexplored – in particular in Left 4 Dead’s use of cinematic cues to heighten suspense and integrate with actual gameplay.

But that doesn’t make the soundtrack to me any less satisfying. With nods to spooky scifi and electronica convention alike, it nonetheless emerges with a distinctive voice – much like the game itself. In a world of cookie-cutter mainstream gaming, at least in the triple-A territory, the success of the title could be encouraging. Find it here:
http://www.thinkwithportals.com/music.php

Found via the superb gaming blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun; who also note two additional volumes are on the way. Follow CDM’s Twitter feed and we’ll let you know when those hit.

And if you’d like to see more covered than in the interview above, let us know.

Jim Guthrie was a rockstar long before the iPad was. Paired with pixel-intense artist Craig D. Adams (aka Superbrothers) and the co-design and coding effort of a crack team of video game “wizards” at the indie studio capy, he’s made a soundtrack that’s destined to be a gaming classic. But if you don’t want to play it, you can still listen to it. And if you’re playing it, you may find that it feels as though you’re listening to it, and gazing into its artwork.

From the moment you tap to launch it, Swords & Sworcery plunges you into a world that’s part game, part interactive album. Yes, there’s the obvious presence of a spinning vinyl record you can scratch and brake, right there on the title screen. And yes, there’s the conspicuous “EP” in the title, or the just-released LP (a real LP, on digital but also now sold out on vinyl).

But it’s once you navigate the expansive digital forests of the title, once Jim Guthrie’s moody soundtrack taps away at your brain, that you begin to get it. Sword & Sworcery will certainly get the dreaded (or is that coveted?) “arty” title, but it’s the way in which it spins out audiovisual entertainment that makes it special.

It’s pure aesthetic deliciousness, a brew that makes your head buzz.

And it’s finding that aesthetic sense – neither retro nor modern, neither low-fidelity nor slick – that makes this title relevant beyond even the world of gaming. Jim Guthrie’s songs and the lush pixel art graphics are the perfect fusion of old and new. It’s telling that Guthrie himself crafts his tracks in a combination of a PlayStation music game (MTV-branded, no less), GarageBand, and then high-end Universal Audio plug-ins. (See video above, and have fun gear-spotting familiar toys through the jump cuts.) It’s sort of studio garage, in the way digital music can be now. Its unabashedly synthetic instrumentation gives voice to a generation that grew up with computer-produced music. The musical score itself sometimes nods to Philip Glass, sometimes to punk rock, very often a mixed-up, intimate fantasy folk cinema, with sounds both shiny and flat.

But happily, this isn’t just a game with a clever soundtrack, or a release of game music. It’s a real fusion of album and game, music and visuals. And, lest we get to carried away with the Art label – capital a – music and game alike are good fun.

CDM managed to pry co-creators Craig D. Adams and Jim Guthrie from an adoring gaming press long enough to talk to us in depth about the making of the music and release, down to every last technical and artistic detail. They said so much – and crossed two media so completely – that I’ve broken up their ideas into two stories, across Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion. Their reasoning for committing to those two media has a lot in common, I think, with why we run these two sites and why a lot of you read and contribute to them.

Out now: both an LP music release on Bandcamp and iPad version. Coming this month: recent-gen iPod touch and iPhone versions of the game, too.

Jim Guthrie: Sword & Sworcery LP – The Ballad of the Space Babies @ Bandcamp
http://www.swordandsworcery.com/project/

Let’s begin with the notion of this as musical-visual collaboration. Obviously, some of our favorite game experiences have used music effectively. What’s different about this project?

Craig:The iPhone & iPod Touch, and the iPad to some extent, don’t have an input style that lends itself to precise inputs. So, it seems to me that a lot of traditional video games seem to fall a bit flat on these platforms. The thing is, these machines are great music and video players, so we knew going in that we wanted to make something that was as open and as laid-back as a record-listening experience matched with a naturalistic visual presentation inspired by film, so that was really the starting point. We also felt that a more relaxed, more occasional, less punishing, more interesting experience would be a better fit, something that was closer in pace to browsing the Internet or whatever. Early on we were calling S:S&S EP “a brave experiment in Input Output Cinema.” I/O Cinema is kind of an intentionally absurd nonsense buzzword but I think it’s perfectly apt for this type of entertainment, it’s a heckuva lot more descriptive than ‘videogame’ anyways, in that it gets away from the idea of a program with rules and win/lose conditions and it puts the focus more on the conversation the audience has with the creators while the audience pokes, prods & problem-solves an authored audiovisual creation.

How did you work together, Superbrothers and Jim, to combine music and visually? What was that collaboration like?

Craig: When we looped Jim into the project in we told him the name, described the aesthetic, talked a bit about The Legend of Zelda & Castlevania, and then Jim dug around and found a few songs he thought might fit. I went ahead and tried to generate art & narrative concepts using Jim’s songs or else stand-ins to set the mood. As we started to mix things together we’d evaluate, iterate & improvise. Eventually we’d get into situations where me and Kris, Capy’s creative director and co-designer on S:S&S EP, would have a plan for an environment or a scene or a situation, and we’d get the art & the mechanics together and then pass along a rough build to Jim with some kind of suggestion like ‘go John Carpenter on this one’ or whatever, and then Jim’d work his magic, filter the concept through his music-making mind and barf up something totally beautiful & shockingly perfect. So yeah, it was a messy process, but towards the end we kind of got a feel for it, I think it all worked out super well.

Jim: It wasn’t always clear if the art needed to inspire more music or the other way around, but it was a very necessary process considering the relation the two elements share in the game.

Technically speaking, is there anything unique to the way the music integrates with game play? How did you approach the technical challenge there, in other words?

Craig: For the music integration aspect, we really just made things up as we went along. We tried some things; some of them worked, some of them didn’t. Then we’d iterate on them or revise them as necessary. We tried chopping things up into a million loops and then stringing them back together with logic, and it kind worked, but was kinda rough, so then we’d revise it or refine it. Eventually we started to figure out a bit of a groove – we learned what the limits were with the machines & the quirks of fMOD [the game sound engine]. We’re a whole lot wiser now, but I think it was a positive thing going into something like this a bit naive.

Jim: Technically, there’s nothing in this game that hasn’t been done before. We sort of ‘stood on the shoulders of giants’ and made it our own. It’s more about the mood and atmosphere that the music and art create that is special. Like Craig said, we made things up as we went.

From the beginning, we knew it was very possible that this would be released digitally as an album, but it wasn’t until a little later on that the idea of vinyl struck us as a good idea. You would think it was all planned from the beginning considering how often the image of the record appears in the game but it sort of willed itself in that direction over time.

It’s always tough to describe the process of summoning one’s art. After we had sort of figured out what the first few tracks were going to be, I just let Craig’s art and ideas lead the way and I reacted. It also really comes down to knowing your craft and what tools you use to create with. Once you figure that out the tools don’t get in the way when you’re hot on the trail of a fleeting melody. There’s noting worse than loosing that spark because a technical issue. Computers have robbed me of so many musical sparks, but to be fair, they have given it back tenfold.

I will give into the temptation to ask one obvious question – what does it mean that it’s an EP? Obviously, it’s a reference to the notion of a game release as being akin in some way to an album, but anything beyond that you wish to say?

Craig:The EP concept goes back to the start of the project – we wanted to put the sound component right out front. We wanted the whole project to feel like a musical composition, and at first we wanted to make something small and acknowledge that this was a tentative first release by a new videogame ‘band.’ The project grew from ther,e and it goes well beyond the 37 minute running-time we had originally envisioned, but everything else fits.

We had always planned to prepare a record release to accompany the project and when the time came to commit to this we basically had to make a vinyl edition, and Jim basically just put that into gear on his own… so that became Jim Guthrie’s Sword & Sworcery LP – The Ballad of the Space Babies. While the record is a smaller component of the project in terms of man-hours, the music on its own is kind of larger than the art and the story we tried to create in the actual videogame, so I think it’s kind of perfect that it’s the LP.

Jim, the music really has a quirky personality all its own, and I think it’d be too easy to describe it aesthetically. How did you approach scoring the music, in finding a voice for this title?

Craig: Several of Jim’s songs pre-date the project, so they informed the aesthetic & concepts from the start. My role early on was to translate the music into artwork & narrative that would fit the general idea of the project. But yeah, beyond that I’ll let Jim fill in the blanks here!

What’s the production process like for the music itself?

Jim: I captured all of the music either on a PlayStation using MTV’s Music Generator and/or
[Apple] GarageBand. For example, on the song, ‘Lone Star,’ I drummed a beat onto a cassette four-track, burned that onto a CD, placed the CD into the PlayStation, sampled and looped in MTV Music Generator,
and then built a song around it using that software. THEN I brought it into GarageBand and added more layers and effects. I also used a [Casio] SK-1 peppered throughout. In terms of plug-ins and soft synths, I used a lot of the Arturia stuff, [Native Instruments] Kontakt, [XLN Audio] Addictive Drums, [Toontracks] Superior Drummer, and a [Universal Audio] UAD-2 card loaded with a bunch of their processing plug-ins.

Not all games are narrative, and I’ve never found conventional narrative to be a prerequisite to art (cough, Ebert). But there is a strong narrative aspect to this title, too. How do you go about telling a story and building a game mechanic at once? (And, for that matter, do you still scrawl things on index cards to get there?)

Craig: It’s funny, we are getting some positive responses to S:S&S EP’s narrative, but really, the narrative only exists to make sense of the player’s experience; it’s not exactly ‘the point.’ We started with the songs, then the art, then the mechanics that would bring it together. And while the broad narrative concepts were always there, it was only in the final stages that the script came together, and really it’s just a way for us to help communicate what’s supposed to be going on. I was on the line to write the script, and for a good long while, it kinda sucked while I was buried under art, sound & design tasks, but I kept iterating on it, editing it for brevity, clarity, and humor, with Jim and Kris and a few others kinda guiding the process.

So yeah, I guess we did some okay things with narrative, and I’m actually super-proud of the mind-fuck tear-jerker heart-breaker finale, but I think the only reason any of it comes across is because of Jim’s music wrapped up in paintings. And really, Jim’s songs are all the narrative I ever wanted.

Now that you’ve become gaming rockstars, what’s next?

Jim: A bottle of vodka?

Craig: Hahahaha… Jim’s already a rockstar, so this stuff is probably old news. I think we’re definitely enjoying our fifteen minutes of fame in this very specific niche, and I’ve been trying – maybe too hard – to keep that buzz going so the project stays visible as we gear up for the all-important iPhone & iPod Touch launch. Once all that’s out of the way, I’m really just looking forward to some quiet time: bike rides, swimming, hiking, and whatever else.

We’ll keep the Sword & Sworcery project rolling along in the background too. We have plans for a gala event here in Toronto in a few months and some other schemes related to the app itself that’ll last the year & maybe into next year. We’ve been given a real opportunity here & we want to continue to honor that.

What are you excited about in gaming – or, for that matter, audiovisual work – at the moment, beyond your own work? Anything you’re listening to, watching, playing (or all three) at the moment?

Jim: Honestly, I went into my iTunes to have a look at my ‘Recently Played’ list and for as far as the eye could see, it’s all stuff I’m working on. No time for art! Just work!

Craig: I’ve been too busy and too exhausted to be paying much attention to what’s happening out there in videogames, film or music. To be honest, what I’m most excited about right now is the prospect of getting some fresh air and some exercise, maybe getting away from electronic screens for a bit sometime, and then after a little break maybe starting on some new creative work.

I had the opportunity to see 2001: A Space Odyssey in theaters a few months ago. I’d seen it a few times before but only on VHS… so that was a real treat, it’s an entirely different film in the theaters, there’s so much more to enjoy. I’m also a huuuge fan of Kanye West’s “Runaway.” I think that’s a genuinely incredible piece of audiovisual work; Vanessa Beecroft’s art direction really shines. Banksy’s Exit Through The Gift Shop and James Cameron’s Avatar blew me away too, for entirely different reasons. I’ve just recently seen my friend Firas Momani’s Fantasia Festival award-winning short film The Adder’s Bite & it gave me all those groovy Cronenberg + Lynch + Kubrick feelings, very inspiring.

On the video game side I’m still intermittently playing Motorstorm: Pacific Rift for PS3, a 2008 effort from Liverpool’s Evolution Studios that I think is basically perfect, plus I’m digging in to Monster Hunter Tri on Wii. I’m playing Monster Hunter co-operatively with a couple friends every Sunday morning… we’re still just scratching the surface but it’s easily the most intricate and deep video game I’ve ever played, which takes me way outside of my comfort zone in an interesting way. I’m also cautiously optimistic about L.A. Noire, Uncharted 3, and The Last Guardian… we’ll see how they work out in the end.

On the music side, I’ve been listening to Jim’s Sword & Sworcery LP… even though I’ve heard these tunes so much in the last two years that my ears hurt, the record itself still comes across as beautiful & fresh, the songs still evoke all kinds of imaginings. That record aside I’ve got a heckuva lot of catching up to do… but first I have to give my ears a bit of a break. That said, I’m amped for the Beastie Boys record that’s hitting in the next little while.

All images courtesy Superbrothers and Jim Guthrie. Used with permission.

Do let us know what you think of the game, folks – or whatever audiovisual creations, in the form of games or otherwise, inspire you.

More on the art, the design, the coding – and why Superbrothers went iOS-only.

On our sister site:
Inside Handheld Game Art: The Art Style and Making of Swords & Sworcery, Superbrothers Pixel Cinema [Create Digital Motion]

And, oh yeah, don’t forget to get the game:
http://www.swordandsworcery.com/

Sure, it’s a Spaghetti-Western-inspired soundtrack to the hit Rockstar game called jokingly by fans Grand Theft Horse. But to me, a richly-composed musical score for a blockbuster video game sums up a lot of where music production is at these days. Composed by Bill Elm and Woody Jackson, Red Dead Redemption gets a score that blends Western authenticity with more experimental ambiances. We get a first glimpse of that process with a behind-the-scenes video released by Rockstar (and reproduced on CDM with permission) this week.

Watch past the boilerplate voiceover as they get into the production, and you’ll see some glimpses of real gems. Aside from harmonica legend Tommy Morgan, they’ve got themselves one seriously wonderful collection of odd instruments. (There’s some of the organic, decayed instrumental sense of Diego Stocco here, who with Hans Zimmer made the rusty clang and bang of Sherlock Holmes last winter.)

What’s this got to do with digital music? In the post-sampling age, even the oldest, most broken-down sound can become digital. And old, entirely acoustic sonic tricks are being rediscovered by today’s generation. Sometimes it takes years behind sound-alike convolution reverbs to convince you that what you should really do is just play into a kettle drum.

There’s also a new approach to composition necessitated by games, which ironically brings game scoring – itself inspired mainly by film composition – in line with techniques associated with electronic music and DJing (stems, loops, and the like). I don’t think any game has yet mastered the challenge; game industry workflows, technical limitations, deadlines, and the sheer enormity of having to re-learn compositional narrative in interactive contexts all conspire against that. But an open-ended Old West playground seems a good place to begin.

The basic techniques here are nothing new in gaming; what’s nice is that the game’s setting opens up something other than the parade of licensed radio (Grand Theft Auto) or conventional orchestral soundtrack. In order to keep things digestible, I’m fairly certain you’re not getting a full taste of everything the musical coordinators did, so I will try to talk to them more. The big limitation of game soundtracks in the next-generation console era has been that the relative flexibility of MIDI-driven soundtracks has been replaced with better-sounding, but more inflexible recorded audio. Then again, the challenge of how to make audio more dynamic is one that live laptop musicians face as do game designers.

I hope to have more with the makers of this score soon, so if you have questions or ideas, let us know.

Those crazy Amiga artists were ahead of their time. The lightweight real-time music engines and formats they began were uncommonly efficient, and allowed the exchange of elaborate electronic music using a minimum of resources – with some accompanying compositional and sound design ingenuity required, as well. As a result, getting a phone handset to reproduce their work today is a pretty manageable task, and some of the music available is concise and clever. Pop on some headphones, load up some tunes, and you may feel you’re starring in your very own Amiga point and click adventure the next time you hit the grocery market.

There are a number of trackers and mod players for mobile platforms from iPhone to Windows Mobile, but Android is now in on the game thanks to Xmp (Extended Module Player). Using Android’s JNI-based NDK interface for accessing native code from Java, the “experimental” queue up some files and play back on your SD card. My sense is that this hasn’t been widely tested, which is where you come in: got an Android phone? Ideally, got some obscure models of Android phone? Load this up and see if you’re getting the retro tracker music love. Let us know in comments how it goes.

Full downloads and code for Xmp, a command-line mod player for Mac, Windows, Linux and pretty much every OS every invented, along with the experimental Android port:
http://xmp.sourceforge.net/

Thanks to Dan Galpin, developer advocate at Google, for pointing this out to me.

Now, this brings me to my open question. Suffice to say, someone could build a pretty player interface for Xmp, with playlist support and the lot. But what about actually editing files on your Android device, as you can on iPhone, PSP, GamePark, PC, Mac, etc.? It’s possible that the Xmp code could be used as a template for porting the engine of something like LittleGPTracker. But looking through quickly, I wonder if Xmp itself might serve as a real-time engine? It’d also be interesting to design a tracker interface that took the UI patterns of platforms like Android to heart, rather than just reproducing interfaces designed for other platforms. If you’re interested in such a project or have some insight into what might be practical, let us know in comments.

For many, mobile technology and developing for the iPhone and the iPod touch is a fad and a Gold Rush. Good designers, though, take a longer view of how interaction can be expressive. And there are few people with a better sense of the big picture of small devices than Dr. Ge Wang. The co-founder, CTO, and Chief Creative Officer of Smule has a background that goes well beyond the latest Apple platform. Along with Perry Cook at Princeton, Ge Wang is the co-originator of ChucK, a real-time programming language for synthesis so efficient some people use it live onstage. (ChucK, as an open source project, now has a terrific team of people behind it.) ChucK is the sonic engine that powers Smule’s projects. Ge Wang also teaches at Stanford, working with students and fellow researchers to explore new ways of interacting with music technology.

Ge Wang joined me for a lengthy phone conversation recently. He really contextualized why the iPhone is important in the grand scheme of things, but also how the people at Smule and Stanford (and Princeton) can approach technology for musical interaction, focusing on what devices are rather than what they’re not.

(The audio here, believe it or not, is extensively edited – Ge Wang is that easy to talk to. I hope the next time it’s over beers rather than Skype.)

The full interview can be played below, or downloaded directly.

[podcast]http://createdigitalmusic.com/files/media/podcasts/2009/07/gewang.mp3[/podcast]

Download MP3 of the interview

Thanks to KORG and the Nano Series for their support of programming on createdigitalmusic.com.

Lastly: a video of the Smule team headquarters and playing around with Leaf Trombone for a Zelda duet!

More information:
The Mule Chronicles [Smule Blog]
http://smule.com/
Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), Stanford University

Previously, for more on Ge Wang and CCRMA:
Make:TV Meets Stanford Musical Inventors, Feedback Piano

Video + Audio Subscriptions, iTunes Podcast

CDM is now launching regular audio content on the artists and inventors we cover as part of our series CDM Sounds. You can subscribe (and review the podcast) via iTunes, where you’ll also find our new video series:

cdm Sounds Podcast [audio]
cdm TV

Or using your software of choice, subscribe directly to RSS. (I like to follow podcasts with Banshee and Winamp this way.)

We’ve fixed some transcoding issues for iPod touch/iPhone on the video podcast. Please do test this and let us know if you have any issues on your software/hardware.

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!

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.

The Right Wrong

Pipe organ, kalimba, baby toys, didgeridoo, conga, claps, IKEA stopwatch, church bell, vocals, ambience

One of the things I’m playing with is trying to do the right thing wrong — I call it the right wrong.

Some of these instruments [I sample] suffered through [the sampling process]. When you sample, you have to take it one step further. When it gets into the computer, it dies a bit. I don’t know what it is, there’s a translation issue. You have to push it further.

tonehammer_lakeside_organ_demo_4_dressed.mp3

Naked Ear

Kalimba, hang-drum, IKEA flower vase, Coke Bottle, public domain vocals – girl’s choir

We have certain ways we get stuck as composers — certain harmonic progressions and so forth. What I’m trying to do is more of a naked ear. I disregard any kind of theory. If it sounds right, it is right.

It’s an awesome practice, because it allows you to step out of theory.

This is a $19 kalimba. I don’t buy the most expensive instrument — I get 90% out of this instrument. And I can torture it through sampling. IKEA is the best music store; I don’t know if you know that.

Sometimes we get super caught in [the idea that ] it needs to be pristine, it needs to be high quality — it doesn’t matter. You get it in the mix, you can totally make something wonderful out of it.

I never have anything 24-bit …. It doesn’t really matter.

tonehammer_kalimba_demo_1.mp3

No Fear

Propane drum, flower vase, Coke bottle, kalimba, monkey balls, harmonica, vocals

[On eBay], I found this wonderful drum. I have a hang drum, this super-expensive crazy drum. This one was way better, and it’s like $300.

tonehammer_propanium_demo_1_dressed.mp3

Twist and Tweak

Didgeridoo, soda tabs, water cooler ensemble, hang drum

[On working with a Dr. Pepper soda.] You can … tap it to become percussion, you can also talk into it, sing into it … I multisampled [the taps] into an entire instrument.

tonehammer_didge_demo_1_dressed.mp3

It Doesn’t Matter

Things don’t matter so much. I was playing a 7-string guitar, and it wasn’t nasty enough. I took all the strings and drop tuned them to the same note … so it didn’t make a sound any more. I got this nasty sound to it. I’m starting more and more to let go of these conventions …how it should be.

I took a 5 string bass and again I couldn’t get it nasty enough — I’m not a great musician by any means. Put it down on the table, let the surgery begin. I put towels down to mute the sound. I played it with drumsticks, and got this tight sound that I was looking for.

Especially in the low frequencies of instruments, you get these … amazing, fat sounds. There’s so much you can do.

Sampling a Restroom

One of the best songs — I went to a restroom. I always use the handicapped restroom because there’s more space and you can be alone. I hate American restrooms – European restrooms are closed, you can’t see in to see what people are doing.

[On the result -- multi-sampling the metal bar next to the toilet in a handicapped restroom.] You expand your palette when you do that. There are so many sounds out there.

Boiled [and timestretched) Waterphone

There's so much you can do in terms of torture to get more out of it. Of course you can strum it, you can play it sort of percussively. But then you can boil it.

It was totally ruined in the end. But at least someone has boiled a waterphone.

We recorded it at different temperatures. It started spinning, as well, as you got to higher temperatures.

[In a separate experiment, timestretching:] As you know, the waterphone is impossible to control tonally. [I tried] timestretching a single note — [Native Instruments’ sampler] Kontakt has a harmonizer — putting some other notes on top of it to make a more strange, otherworldly sound to it.

Hybrid [Stacked] Orchestras

Unfortunately game composers are asked to do epic scores all the time. The main elements in it — it’s really about stacking. It needs several different libraries; you can’t stack the same library or it starts phasing. I like to stack until it starts phasing. You can also stack until it starts clipping.

There is no less — there’s only more.

I have synths for the bases, I have drones that line underneath the basses. Arpeggiators are almost mandatory for strings, so when you have stacatto notes — which is also stacked, at least two or three libraries — you also have arpeggiators under that.

It’s the art of adding, epic music.

tbf_epic_orchestral_demo_2009.mp3

The Future of Music

i think the future of music is partly all of us exploring more textures. We all want to do epic music and trailers …. and everyone is sounding a lot alike now. Especially in games; I never hear things that sound all that unique. We have to find ways to differentiate ourselves.

I’m a super commercial composer … I force myself to step out of that.

There are many many ways that we can stand apart. The best thing ever is the Zoom [H4 portable digital] recorder. I use it for everything, for the handicapped recording. There are sounds all over. You can break the convention, break the theory.

Successfully Sampling Choirs

The sampling is incredibly demoralizing. So you have to actually have them play a melody. If you get a performance that is not emotional, it totally dies.

We got an entire Eastern European orchestra drunk. It was a huge help. …They were half drunk, so they could still play.

Successfully Sampling Drums

Percussion is its own science. It’s important when you do recording sessions to dent the drums. If you don’t dent the drum …it won’t work. A mistake a lot of people make is …they only use one stick. Always use two sticks. The sound may flange .. it doesn’t matter. And those sticks need to break, if you want “triple-X” percussion.

Favorite Tools

Timefreezer is just incredible — you have to sculpt it in realtime, don’t just make a drone. Put it in multisamplers, map to velocity and really sculpt that tone. Put them in a sampler and assign it to a mod wheel — anything you have to do to get more control.

LA Scoring Strings is coming out — it’s the first library that’s really nailed legato. [with legato for different tempi] …solo instruments, divisi, full section.

The Wizoo W2 reverb plug-in…[now distributed through M-Audio / part of the Advanced Instruments Research group at Digidesign]

Compositional Process

Daily Exercises:

1. Watch YouTube

2. Chat and forums

3. Listen

4. Network

5. Talent = time = fun

I listen more than I compose these days. I listen two or three hours a day consciously. For me the process of listening is as important as composing.

Troels also listed some of his own inspirations, which included YouTube videos seen on this site:

Video Mashed Kutiman Funk: What if All of YouTube Played a Song?

Depressing Project of the Day: Stock Market, Set to Music with Microsoft Songsmith

What’s interesting about this is that he took these not simply as worktime distractions but inspiration for his own work – to try to analyze the thought process behind the videos and do something similar in his own work.

Here’s an example of his own: what’s the sound of one hand clapping? Well, here’s one hand clapping, made into an entire composition:

One sound composition

For more on Troels’ own sample house:

tonehammer

And everything on Troels himself:

http://www.troelsfolmann.com/

Previously, right here on CDM:

Weekend Inspiration: Coke Bottle as Tribal Percussion, and the Future of Adaptive Music

CDM Interview: Tomb Raider: Legend Composer Troels Brun Folmann on Adaptive “Micro-Scoring”

There’s plenty to process here, so I hope we’ll talk to Troels again soon.