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/

Composing the sounds of an animal’s life cycle and ultimate consumption into a musical portrait, Matthew Herbert’s “One Pig” is in turns grotesque and sentimental, rock and opera. I expected squeamishness and vegetarian conversions when I saw it on tour, but instead, the crowd eagerly devoured the creature at the end. (Make of that what you will.)

One Pig is in Manchester, UK tonight before continuing to Brighton and Portugal.

As my own incurable appetite is for musical instruments, for me a highlight of the show is Scotland-based, American artist Yann Seznec’s Sty Harp. (See also our coverage of his iPad music game development work.) Gut strings in historical instruments already make use of animal parts, so a stringed instruments seems appropriate. But by dissecting obsolete, forgotten technology – a bit of a theme in these parts lately – Yann is able to make an effective, expressive instrument.

Sadly, there’s not much video of the instrument in action, but seeing it is a highlight of the live show. Yann’s performance has its own theatricality, rocking out on these extended strings around the “pig pen” like a boxer swinging against the ropes of a ring. First, Yann shares some notes on the show itself:

The album is an elegy to a life lived for the benefit of humans and raises complex questions about our relationship to these often-maligned and misunderstood creatures.

The album is made entirely out of sounds from the pig and its surroundings – the first squeals, the sound of it being alone for the first time, and the dripping of its blood after being butchered. The result is a delicate, beautiful, and occasionally terrifying musical composition with a profundity rarely heard in electronic music.

The live show debuted at the Royal Opera House, London, in September 2011 and has since toured the world, performing at Berghain Berlin, STRP Eindhoven, Club Silencio Paris, Liquid Room Tokyo, Ancienne Belgique Brussels, and more. Future dates include headlining at Future Everything in Manchester, the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

The show explores and questions the life, death, and consumption of the pig. A chef cooking onstage brings the sound and smell of cooking pig, and the performance features a brand new custom instrument – the “Sty Harp”, built and performed by Edinburgh-based artist Yann Seznec. This representation of the pig’s home is used to trigger and control elements of music, forming an integral part of the 5 piece band. The rest of the band is comprised of Sam Beste on keyboards, Tom Skinner on SPDS, Hugh Jones on samplers, and Matthew on various keyboards and samples and things.

Yann explains how the instrument itself is constructed:

In terms of the Sty Harp, the instrument is built using hacked Gametraks, which were a failed proto-motion controller from around 2003. They were sold only in the UK, and worked by using two joysticks with strings attached that you clipped onto your hands. These could then sense the distance and vague location of your hands …a few terrible games were released on PS2, Xbox, and PC for the Gametrak before they were pulled from the market.

In any case, I took apart a whole load of these (I probably have owned more gametraks than anyone in the world, ever) and used their innards for the string/joystick controllers, which are totally great! I built a whole system with Jon (from Lucky Frame) to hook up twelve of these controllers into my computer at once. I’m using an Arduino with a mux shield to handle the 36 analog inputs (x/y/string for 12 controllers) at once, converting them into MIDI and sending them over to Ableton.

In Ableton the controllers are doing a number of different things, slightly different for each song. In the Max patch I made I can send out 5 individual MIDI notes from each string, one for general movement above a threshold, and one each for a push, pull, up, or down movement. These movements are also sending out CC values, as is the pulling of the string. So each string controller is sending a whole pile of MIDI data at all times, and I pick and choose for each song which gestures to use. So in some cases I’m just triggering individual sounds using the strings, but in others I am using some strings to trigger clips, others to control effects on those clips, and still other effects to do master play/stop/effects/etc.

The climax of the Sty Harp happens about 2/3rds of the way through the show, when the whole band joins me in the sty for the symbolic butchering of the pig. For that song each band member controls different strings, building a huge sound wall.

You can read more about my building of the sty harp here: http://theamazingrolo.net/styharp/

We’re playing in Manchester on Friday the 18th, Brighton on Monday the 21st, then in Lisbon on June 29th and Porto on June 30th.

http://www.matthewherbert.com/
Matthew Herbert – One Pig: exclusive album stream [The Guardian]

Obsolescence: it seems inescapable, as generations of old gear are replaced with shiny, new ones. But one person’s discarded electronic trash can be an artist’s electronic treasure.

ReFunct Media is a collaborative to make something out of all that used junk. In parades of strange, twitching machines and orchestras of electronic noise, gear goes from landfill fodder to art stars. The collective effort has made its way from Ireland (Imoca, RuaRed) to France (Gaité Lyrique) to, most recently, Berlin and the LEAP gallery, where we catch up with it in the form of some raucous video documentation. The artists themselves are known experimental creators and musicians and hackers – known, at least, in these parts: Benjamin Gaulon (IE/FR), Niklas Roy (DE), Karl Klomp (NL), Tom Verbruggen (NL) and Gijs Gieskes (NL).

You can see the whole lineup at top, and in the video below – a procession of glitchy gear. The installation was joined in Berlin recently by a series of performances from these artists.

Here’s another view of the ReFunct Media installation.

These works can become performative. TokTek, aka Dutch visual and musical artist Tom Verbruggen, makes twitchy, spastic music, constructing collisions of sound and rhythm from rapid-fire gestures on repurposed joysticks. (I’ve also gotten to enjoy his work at STEIM. Somehow, in this video, it loses something – it’s a crowd-pleasure in person, something about sharing a room with all this nervous sonic energy.)

Tom’s art installation works take on a distinct, but related, character. The whimsical, engaging “Crackle Canvas” is described as part painting, part instrument. It seems something out of Willy Wonka’s studio, an interconnected sound toy that whistles and clicks and sucks up recorded sound, chattering and conversing with itself.

A crackle-canvas is a painting that produces sound. It contains a circuitboad, speaker, knobs, switches, wood and canvas. Each one makes sounds by itself but can be connected through cables (patchedd) with other crackle-canvasses. This way the paintings start to reach to each other.

The artists’ description:

“ReFunct Media” is a multimedia installation that (re)uses numerous “obsolete” electronic devices (digital and analogue media players and receivers). These devices are hacked, misused and combined into a large and complex chain of elements. To use an ecological analogy they “interact” in different symbiotic relationships such as mutualism, parasitism and commensalism.

Voluntarily complex and unstable, “ReFunct Media” isn’t proposing answers to the questions raised by e-waste, planned obsolescence and sustainable design strategies. Rather, as an installation it experiments and explores
unchallenged possibilities of ‘obsolete’ electronic and digital media technologies and our relationship with technologies and consumption.

ReFunct Catalog [PDF]

Well, it certainly keeps the toxic e-waste out of the landfill — good — though I suppose you can’t call it quite green. LEAP tells me that when they switched on this giant assemblage of gear, it did suck up a lot of electricity. But while the artists claim they aren’t making a direct statement about e-waste, the revelation that things can be used and don’t have to be tossed is a profound one. “Awareness” is an overused words and doesn’t always solve problems, but it could transform this one.

Here’s another view of the installation and gallery opening:

And in another instance of repurposing gear, performances by “The Society for Nontrivial Pursuits” engaged in their own form of up-cycled musicality, a bit like the adventures of various Handmade Music evenings around the world – and many of the other artists we’ve written up here on CDM.

LEAP presents a performance evening from The Society for Nontrivial Pursuits (Alberto de Campo, Hannes Hoelzl, and students, alumni and associates of the class Generative Art / Computational Art at UdK Berlin, and others) explore the possibility of spaces of complex systems for experimental performance. They freely combine repurposed elements like analog synthesizers, game controllers, sensors and software with self-built/designed/written hard and soft components.

More from the artists – many with extensive galleries and showcases of work in which you could easily lose yourself…

http://karlklomp.nl/
http://www.toktek.org/
http://gieskes.nl/
http://www.niklasroy.com/
http://www.recyclism.com/ (Benjamin Gaulon)

Apple yesterday described their iPad as “this magical pane of glass that can become anything you want it to be.” So – how about making mobile devices into what you want it to be?

With the help of author Peter Brinkmann and publisher O’Reilly, we’d like to give you a taste of Peter’s new book, Making Musical Apps: Real-time audio synthesis on Android and iOS. Imagining that a lot of you are especially curious about iOS, we’ll include the chapter on how to get started with development. It really gives you a sense of how easy this can be; the challenge is, as it should be, coming up with musical ideas. And Apple did say that they thought that technology was at its best when it was “invisible,” not when it was “inaudible.” So let’s make it make some noise.

(Android developers, libpd actually got its start on Android and runs quite well even on very primitive Android handsets, so consider this a sample; the full book – and the libpd site – include loads of examples on the Android side, too. In fact, because libpd works basically identically on the two platforms, it’s a great choice for making cross-platform development easier.)

In this excerpt, Peter covers:

• How to set up your development environment
• Starting a project with Xcode, and including Pd
• How to make a Pd patch run in your app
• Making the Pd patch and your UI connect with each other (here, from the app’s UI to Pd; the book covers both directions)

In fact, in just a few pages, you’ll have a working guitar tuner for iOS. Have a look:

Read it on CDM’s Scribd page:

Making Musical Apps (Excerpt: How to Build a Music App for iOS)

Direct PDF download link, hosted by CDM (please don’t link to this file directly):
Making Musical Apps (Excerpt) [PDF]

I’ve read an advance copy of the whole book, and my review is simple: if you’re curious about this stuff, get this book. Peter’s style is friendly and precise; no technical detail is left out, and yet those details aren’t overwhelming. The book can be accessible to those new to development, which is essential for a title that’s likely to be read by people who are used to Pd, but dipping their toes into Java and Objective-C for the first time in order to get their patches running on a device.

Ready for the full book?

Get a printed copy on Amazon:

Or read the Kindle edition:

For multi-platform epub, mobi, and PDF formats, head straight to the O’Reilly page:
Making Musical Apps [shop.oreilly.com]

http://libpd.cc/read-the-book/

Pure Data (Pd) is already a free, convenient tool for making synths, effects, and sequencers and other musical generators. But imagine stripping away all the things that tie it to a platform – UI, specific hardware support – so it will run just about anywhere, on anything, in any context.

That’s what libpd, a free, embeddable, open source (BSD) tool for making interactive music, does. Coders can take their favorite language and their favorite platform, and just plug in the power of Pd. They don’t even have to know almost anything about Pd – they can let an intrepid Pd patcher create the interactive sound effects and dynamic music for their game and just drop a patch into their assets.

One of the most powerful applications for this is the ability to add interactive music and sound to mobile apps, on iOS and Android, without writing and testing a bunch of custom DSP code. And that has enabled the use of libpd in apps as successful as Inception: The App. With music by Hans Zimmer and a custom “dream” experience created by RjDj, that app racked up millions of downloads in under a couple of months, and then, far from sitting idle on the app launch screen, went on to clock in over a century of user “dreamtime.”

Okay, so, you’re sold. You want to see what this thing can do, and maybe try it out, and you’re wondering where to start. So, here’s some good news: there’s a new site and a new book to get you going.

The site: libpd.cc

libpd has a new home on the Web, both in the form of a new GitHub repository to organize all the code and docs and samples, and a site that brings together a showcase of what the apps does and points you to where to learn more. The single destination is now hosted here by CDM:

http://libpd.cc

I built that site, so please, if there’s anything you’d like to see or you’ve got your own work created with libpd, let me know about it.

Even just having selected a few key highlights of apps built with libpd, it’s impressive what people are already doing with this tool:

libpd Showcase

The book, and a chat with its author

A new book published by O’Reilly focuses on building mobile apps using libpd, for iOS and Android. (iPhone, iPod touch, Android phones and tablets, and yes, even that “new iPad” introduced yesterday are therefore all fair game.)

You can read a section of the book right here on CDM, for a taste of what’s in store:
How to Make a Music App for iOS, Free, with libpd: Exclusive Book Excerpt

It’s an exceptional, comprehensive look at development using libpd, covering iOS and Android, but also a complete look at the libpd API and how to use it. For Pd patchers just getting started with iOS and Android, it includes all of the basics of how to use libpd in your mobile development environment. For mobile developers new to Pd and patching, it makes clear how you’d communicate with Pd, so you can either dive into Pd yourself or properly interface with patches made by musicians, composers, and sound designers with whom you may be collaborating. It’s an ideal title for anyone interested in taking a game and giving it a more dynamic soundtrack – in sound effects, music or both – or for people building mobile musical instruments and effects, sonic toys, interactive albums, or, really, anything at all that involves sound or music. Since it walks you through the entire development experience, you can sit down with it in the course of a few evenings, and get a complete picture of how to integrate Pd with your development workflow.

Dr. Peter Brinkmann, the principal developer of libpd, is the author of the title. I asked Peter to explain a little bit about the book, who it’s for (hint: you!), and what’s in it (hint: stuff you want to read!) …

CDM: How did this book come about? And the book process really helped drive improvements to libpd, too?

Peter B.: Shawn Wallace, an editor at O’Reilly, contacted me last summer and asked whether I would be interested in writing a short book on libpd. I was interested, and so I talked to my [Google] manager (“No conflict — we all have time-consuming hobbies!”) as well as a couple of colleagues who had written books for O’Reilly. They made a token attempt to dissuade me, but it was clear that they had enjoyed writing their books, and they seemed quite proud of the result, too.

Once I had made up my mind to write a book, the next question was whether to self-publish or go with O’Reilly. Self-publishing is a viable option these days, but then I decided that I really wanted an animal on the cover. Besides, I had never written a book before, and having the support of O’Reilly’s editorial staff made the prospect seem less daunting.

The first draft was done in mid-November, but at that time it was basically science fiction because it presented libpd the way I wanted it to be, not the way it was at the time.

So, after the bulk of the writing was done, libpd needed to be revised so that it would actually be in agreement with the book. In particular, Rich Eakin and I rewrote the iOS components for better performance and usability. That delayed the book by a month or so, which turned out to be a great stroke of luck because that was when I discovered that Xcode 4.2 had changed the entire development model by introducing automatic reference counting, instantly rendering existing
texts obsolete. That included my chapter on iOS, and so I had to sit down and rewrite it.

After that, the rest happened rather quickly — getting reviews, revising the draft, going through the production process. O’Reilly’s toolchain is remarkably efficient, using asciidoc and docbook in a Subversion repository. The editorial staff is great, too. I’m amazed to see how quickly it all came together.

How did you approach writing the book?

For the first draft, I just imagined that I was teaching a class on libpd. When you’re lecturing in front of an audience, you don’t have time to polish every sentence; you just have to talk and maintain some sense of momentum. That approach helps a lot when facing a blank page. After that, it’s many, many rounds of revisions to eliminate weak or redundant sentences.

For the sample code, I picked one project that uses all major components of libpd. That provided a natural progression from idea to completion, while touching on all important points in their proper context. I’m basically providing running commentary on my thought process when making an app, including common mistakes and pitfalls. Like this, readers will know how to recognize and work around most problems.

Another trick is to write more than necessary. The first draft contained a lot of gratuitous editorializing. Those parts were never meant to make it into the finished text, but they were fun to write and they kept me going when I wasn’t quite sure what to write next.

Who it’s for?

The book explains how to patch for libpd, and how to write apps with libpd, with special emphasis on the interface between Pd patches and application code. It’s for mobile developers who want to add real-time audio synthesis to their projects, as well as sound designers who want to deploy their work on mobile devices. It’s light on prerequisites; if you know how to write a basic app for Android or iOS, you’re ready to read the book.

Ed.: I’d add to that, given that there are such great tutorials on app development for Android and iOS – even many of them free, including some very worthwhile documentation from Google and Apple — if you’ve messed with Pd, you should give the book a try. And if you haven’t messed with Pd, this could be a great excuse. This book won’t teach you Pd, but it’ll make very clear how to glue everything together. -PK

Why does a book like this matter? What do you hope will come out of it?

I hope that the book will help popularize real-time procedural audio, in games and other apps. I’m thrilled to see all the projects that use libpd, and I hope that the book will help people create even more awesomeness of this kind. One thing I only fully realized when writing the book is that libpd lets developers use DSP code like a media file: An audio developer creates a Pd patch, and the app developer just drops it into the resources of the app and loads and
triggers it as needed. I guess this was implicit in a blog post I wrote on workflow and prototyping a year ago, but I think the DSP-as-media angle is even more powerful. I hope that the book will bring this out.

The book project has already improved libpd. Whenever I faced the choice between fixing an awkward bit of code or explaining the awkwardness in the book, I chose to fix the code. That took care of all the little things that were sort of bothering me but didn’t seem significant enough to spend time on. It also gave us a deadline for a number of related things that we wanted to do, such as migrating to GitHub and launching the new website, libpd.cc. Ed.: Cough. Yes, glad that gave me that deadline – and thanks to Peter B. for the extra push! -PK

Congrats to Peter on his first animal-on-a-cover! It’s really a great book: you read it, and feel like making more new things, inventing new creations that produce sound and music. And that’s a very good thing.

FRACT is a curious combination of music studio and puzzle game, merging elements of games like Myst with the sorts of synths and pattern editors you’d expect somewhere like Ableton Live. You have to make sounds and melodies to solve puzzles; by the end of the game, say the creators, you’re even producing original music. The work of a small student team out of Montreal, FRACT looks like it has all the makings of an underground indie hit – at least for music nerds.

As the creators describe it:

FRACT is a first person adventure game for Windows & Mac much in the vein of the Myst titles, but with an electro twist. Gameplay boils down to three core activities: Explore, Rebuild, Create. The player is let loose into an abstract world built on sound and structures inspired by electronic music. It’s left to the player to explore the environment to find clues to resurrect and revive the long-forgotten machinery of this musical world, in order to unlock its inner workings. Drawing inspiration from Myst, Rez and Tron, the game is also influenced by graphic design, data visualization, electronic music and analog culture.

The hub of the game is a virtual studio, collecting patterns and timbres. It’s right now in prototype phase, but it already looks visually stunning, an alien, digital world in which more-conventional step-sequencer views seem to emerge from futuristic landscapes. And you can spot Pd in the background (the free and open source patching tool, Pure Data). Update: the developers confirm that they’re working with the embeddable Pd library, libpd. That enables synths with sounds like phase modulation and classic virtual analog sounds, all modulating and generating sounds in-game.

The developers have also published plenty of sound samples so you can experience the musical side of this. Via SoundCloud:

While never released, one place some similar ideas has shown up is a prototype game inspired by Deadmau5. As in this title, two-dimensional editing screens and synth parameters are mapped to a first-person, three-dimensional environment. However, FRACT appears to take this concept much further, expanding upon the world, building more instruments, and actually turning those interactions into gameplay elements. The video of the Deadmau5 project – apparently done in-house for fun and not endorsed by the mouse-headed artist:

That title was the work of a game house called Floaty Hybrid; music blog Synthtopia got the scoop on this in August:
http://www.floathybrid.com
Mau5Bot Sequencer Lets You Make Music In A 3D World [Synthtopia]

We’ll be watching this one develop, certainly; good luck to the team!
http://fractgame.com/

Trust your ears.

It seems a simple instruction, in the teaser video for this project by Stockholm-based producer/composer Håkan Libdo. But for those of us used to having vision, focusing in on one sense – even the sense on which we rely for music and sound – can be an extraordinary experience. If digital interface design has done anything, it has forced new ways of looking at design across senses, and not just in a weary repetition of “we always do it this way.”

Playing tennis in InvisiBall becomes a new experience. Sonic cues along direct the ball from side to side. And apart from experiencing the game – blindfolded or even as a non-seeing person – the result can be a performance. Developed with programmers Magnus Frenning and Jonatan Liljedahl, the game relies on three-dimensional sound and senses user play, a new musical game.

A computer, while tracking the players, seamlessly mixes sonic cues with a musical soundtrack, so that the results are melodic and not only sound effects. Played in a darkened room, the rackets emit infrared light. Wiimotes here don’t move, as they do when playing games like Nintendo’s Wii Tennis; instead, they’re just IR sensors.

An audience gets to “see” the position of that invisible ball, so that spectating is a slightly different sensation; a TV displays where the ball would be.

More information on Håkan Libdo’s site; he tells us this could be making appearances at festivals this year. (So… if you’ve got a festival, and you’re reading… uh, send CDM some tix, too, and we’ll visit?)

http://hakanlidbo.com/archives/2075

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:

You might not expect a handheld game console, the gadget kids use to play Pokemon, to prove much worth as a musical instrument. But even in the age of readily-available computer plug-ins and iPhone apps, the DS holds its own. In the hands of two sets of artists, we find music that stands alone, independent of the gimmick of the device on which it was made. For these artists, the limitations of a fold-up touchscreen – entirely independent of doubling as a phone, or a computer, or a Facebook-browsing engine, or a powerful 64-bit DAW – apparently prove enticing. Beginning with Korg’s DS-10 cartridge, they use a stylus-operated software synth with its own unique character.

On some level, I almost hesitate to wax poetic about the fact that these were made with a Nintendo DS at all, because what these are, really, is love letters to synthesis.

And as it happens, both are available as free downloads from Bandcamp.

First up: AuxPulse is the duo of Rutger Muller and Michael Vultoo, based in Amsterdam and Kockengen, Netherlands, respectively. Late last year, they debuted their first album at Amsterdam’s prestgious Stedelijk Museum of modern art, playing a big set (two and a half hours) on small devices. Primarily employing the Nintendo DS, they nonetheless produce sounds that are rich and layered, sometimes even tending to the ambient exploration, not just the rawer chip-music sounds regularly associated with Nintendo handhelds.

Their music is trippy but danceable, unapologetically electronic, fully exploiting the DS-10′s idiosyncratic sonic character, one that’s slightly lower-fidelity than many soft synths (or even iPhone apps), without being “chippy” in the sense of retro devices. Dark textures collide with precise, clockwork rhythms, in sounds that sometimes tend to acid techno and sci fi game realms. (Lo-acid-fi, anyone?)

As you watch them live, you also see the value of the interface compositionally, both in terms of its pattern banks and its more conventional synth controls, all manipulated with the added precision of a stylus.

As they put it:

We aim to bring experimentation back to the dancefloor by expressing a psychedelic atmosphere through the use of a variety of rhythms and moods. Some of our inspirations are analogue synthesizers, acid, IDM, hardcore, gabber, ambient and oldschool electro.

Right now we mainly use the KORG DS-10 synthesizer for Nintendo DS to compose and improvise our music. When playing live we fuck with the synths as much as we can, trying to surprise ourselves with new sounds.

Our first album was recently released in Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam! Now we perform regularly, trying to open up some minds and move some feet.

The album, on Bandcamp:

And on SoundCloud:
Dream Stages (FREE ALBUM!) by AuxPulse

Bonus: an interview with them (in Dutch, naturally)

In a very different direction, Princeton, New Jersey-based DJ and producer Christian Montoya (love and tonic records) produces music on the DS-10 that’s drier and more exposed, as he programs intricate bass music on the unprocessed Nintendo cart. Christian works as a game designer by day, and channels some of the DS-10′s game music and so-called “chip music” heritage. The results, though, are a perfect marriage of game chip-waveform rawness, nude bass and synth and percussion sounds, and carefully-concocted grooves. For anyone concerned that game systems could hinder moving your butt out of the seat, this album is required listening. It’s utterly stripped-bare dance goodness – and it turns out the DS bass sounds fantastic.

Grab the record for free:

DS-10 users, got any tips for us on getting the most out of a Nintendo handheld and this KORG synth? Let us know.

Also, from comments but worth pointing out, Rutger directs us to good resources for getting the most out of DS-10:

If you’re interested in making DS-10 music you can check out http://www.ds10forum.com

I (Rutger, DS-10 Dominator, 1/2 of AuxPulse) run it with Harley (http://harleylikesmusic.com, superb DS-10 composer!) and we try to help out beginner’s and advanced users as much as we can.

Truly generative musical scores in games have been few and far between, and “music games” has traditionally meant arcade-style rhythm games in which you repeat phrases or whole songs as accurately as possible. Pugs Luv Beats breaks those molds. Part of a vanguard of new gaming creations that generate dynamic music on the fly, it marries grid-based sequencing and resource-gathering gaming, as music making and gameplay blur together. The interactively-produced music could itself become a new way of delivering a musical signature with sound packs.

And beneath it all lurks a free and open source library, libpd – the embeddable version of tried-and-true free graphical music environment Pure Data. (That library is now on GitHub, and vastly updated, by the way, and we’re expecting a book soon from the library’s principle author Peter Brinkmann.)

Oh, yeah, and don’t forget about some seriously addictive gameplay and adorable pugs. I’m suddenly not concerned about the 15 hours Europe-to-North-America travel I’m doing tomorrow.

Here’s what the gameplay looks like, since it’s much easier to see:

Pugs Luv Beats was just approved on the iTunes App Store for iPhone and iPad.

Co-creator Yann Seznec (The Amazing Rolo) is a terrific musician; I just caught up with him in Edinburgh and Berlin and watched him play a homebrewed pig gut instrument with Matthew Herbert for the performance piece “One Pig,” on tour at Berghain. Working with Pd allowed Yann to focus on those musical impulses and not just engineering, and to let him try things he otherwise would never have imagined on a mobile title. So I asked Yann to walk us through how the project was built. He responded with an exhaustively-detailed examination of the evolution of this title, right down to the Pd patches. (Click through for high-res versions.) If your New Year’s Resolution is doing something with patching, you might want to hang onto these answers. Here’s Yann:

The origins of Pugs Luv Beats date back about two years. After making [musical iPhone game] Mujik, Jon (Jonathan Brodsky, aka jonbro) and I were trying to think of other approaches to music mobile app design, and we started thinking more and more about games. Music games, as a whole, are an oddly passive and traditionalist experience – you play along with a premade track, and you are judged on your accuracy and flair (which is strangely reminiscent of music conservatory mindset…). Obviously there are exceptions (RjDj’s Dimensions, Elektroplankton, etc.), but there you go.

Particularly interesting to me was the idea that game mechanics are often very similar to compositional techniques. So for example, when Sonic runs at a normal speed he collects rings at one rate. However when he powers up and goes super fast, he collects rings at a much higher rate. This could be compared to introducing a melody and then speeding it up – and when there are two players, doing this with two melodies. Instant fugue!

We started looking at how we could make a music game where the music and the game elements were fully intertwined and augmented by each other. So Jon prototyped a space shooter drum machine. It was awesome.

To make a (very very very long and boring) story short, our idea and prototype landed us some funding from Channel 4 and Creative Scotland to work on games that focus on musical creativity and composition.

For various reasons, we decided to put aside the space shooter drum machine for a while, and start from scratch. After going through several full prototyping iterations we eventually settled on a core game mechanic that turned out to be in many ways similar to a Tenori-on [Yamaha grid instrument]/Boiingg-style [monome hardware patch] music generation system – in our final prototype, you controlled a series of little dots that moved around the screen, creating loops. This is super fun from a musical perspective because it’s easy and rewarding within a few seconds, and when you have several loops going it can gain some pretty serious rhythmic and melodic depth.

The key from there for us was turning this into a game. We had been using free Internet graphics packs up until then (we hadn’t hired our artist Sean yet) which featured a ladybug, so we had been referring to the main characters as ‘bugs’. During some discussion one of us accidentally said ‘pugs’, and the game idea was born. We constructed a story about pugs and their love for beets (like the vegetables) which create beats (ha!), and how their love turned into greed and got out of control, destroying their world. The game, therefore, is about helping the pugs rebuild their lost civilization by guiding them to create beats. You grow your galaxy by collecting beats, which you do most efficiently when you dress your pugs up in costumes. What’s not to like?

To get to the part that I imagine CDM readers are most interested in, the app development was done by Jon using openFrameworks, [lightweight language] Lua, our own game engine called Blud, and the audio is all done in Pure Data using libpd (through ofxPd). In hindsight we started using libpd really late in the game, just at the very end of the prototyping stage, which was rather silly. Our adoption of libpd basically made our dev cycle about a million times more efficient. My background is as a musician and sound designer, and I have very little coding knowledge. I do, however, have lots of knowledge of Max/MSP, so picking up Pure Data was pretty easy. This allowed Jon to completely pass off all the audio processing (not to mention aesthetic sound design choices) to me, saving him loads of time, giving me direct control over the sound, and letting me test and prototype different approaches to audio within an environment that I knew would be recreated in the game. Also, as Jon mentioned to me recently, by using PD we are able to take advantage of 20 years of audio DSP research and development. Pretty amazing.

How it all works:

The entire audio engine is contained within this patch. Pardon the messiness.

The simplest part of the patch is the “sounds” section, which is used to playback simple sound effects, for the most part linked with interface actions in the game. I did this by creating a very simple patch which plays a sound when it receives a bang. Which sound it plays is dictated by the argument (in this case, the sound of discovering a new capsule). The process for adding a new sound, then, is as simple as adding the sound file to the /assets/sounds/ folder, and making a new instance of “sounds.pd” and naming it the same as the new sound. Jon, in the project code, created a list called “sounds” which is sent into Pure Data. When that list contains “capsule”, a bang is sent into that subpatch, and the sound is played.

A more complex version of what could be done with this type of data is seen in the voice of Mr Puggles, who helps you learn how to play the game. Mr Puggles pops on and off the screen to guide you through the first few worlds, and when he does he send Pure Data a “puggleShow” and “puggleHide” signal. I wanted to give Puggles a funny synthesizer voice that was different every time – dead simple in PD. To do that, I take the puggleShow bang and use it to trigger five more bangs, spaced out over a second. Each of these bangs triggers a random number which is translated into a MIDI note. This note controls the pitch of two oscillators (a sine and a sawtooth), one of which is slightly modified to make them slightly different pitches. These are played through a short volume envelope and a filter which is also controlled by a random number generator. Result? Hilarious beeping boopy Mr Puggles voice, all coming from one bang.

Every time a player buys or selects a planet, a short list is sent to Pure Data comprised of the planet BPM and a random number seed. The BPM is used to calculate delay times and such, and the random number seed is used to create a sort of musical identity for the planet. This is done by choosing a “beat library” and a musical mode.

The mode is created by building a lookup table that chooses the notes from a chromatic scale that would be used in a particular mode. For example, a major scale (ionian mode) uses notes 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, and 12. Each melodic sound library I used is comprised of a full chromatic octave, and the notes that are played on any given planet are controlled by this table. This ensures not only that all of the different sound libraries being played on a planet will be in the same key, but also that a planet will have a strong melodic identity.

The sound libraries in the game are all controlled by the pugs on the planets. As they run around, each time they land they will trigger a sound. The type of sound is dependent on what terrain they are on – thus, if they run through the snow they play a toy piano, if they run through lava a distorted guitar, etc. There are two states of playing the sound, one if the player deliberately tells the pug to go to that tile, and the second if the pug is traveling over that tile to get somewhere else. It’s super easy to do that kind of thing in Pd; just set up two different ‘play sound’ envelopes, maybe a little extra delay or reverb, and you’re done!

The final piece of the puzzle for making the pugs running around into music is to make each tile be a different note. The terrain of each planet is created by making a sort of height map, where different heights correspond with different terrain types (grass, water, snow, etc). This also means that each tile has a unique number between 0 and 1. When the player buys or selects a planet, a giant random number table is generated in Pure Data which creates a number between 1 and 13 for each possible value between 0 and 1. That value is what is used to pick the note of the mode. This somewhat convoluted approach again lets us make sure that each planet will have a unique, but fully reproducible, musical character.

The actual playing of the sounds is probably the messiest part of the patch structure. Purists look away now.

I wanted to make sure this part of the patch was as flexible as possible, so I ended up using the soundfiler and tabread~ objects, rather than tabplay~, which is great in practice though does look rather uncouth. Additionally, I had some limitations imposed upon the structure of the patch – namely, I had to keep the number of tables down as much as possible, to save on memory. So each sound bank has two voice polyphony – there are many sound banks, and the beats and sound effects aren’t counted in this, so that limitation is not really heard in the final product at all. It did mean I had to work out a decent voice allocation system though!

I think my memory issues were probably my only problem with using PD in this project – though only indirectly. As I mentioned, they were hardly a problem artistically, however it took me a while to get used to the idea that not everything I patched on a computer would work on an iPhone. Similarly, I had to be very careful about things like relative volumes. In a generative music game like Pugs Luv Beats, the player could quite easily send 15 pugs running around making sound, which mounts up pretty quickly. It means that all of the patches and sound need to be designed to withstand lots of triggering without distorting. None of these things are problems, really, all they require is regular testing on devices and simulators – something that every mobile developer is already used to.

That’s the Pure Data audio engine in a nutshell. The end result is a flexible and powerful audio engine that sounds really great and is fully integrated into Pugs Luv Beats. The game is a great combination of music, silliness, and strategy – there’s a bit of something in there for everyone. You can definitely just play with the game to make beats, or you can try and collect all of the costumes, or you can try and make the most efficient planet ever. You can also explore the galaxies being made by your Game Center friends, to hear what they’re up to.

The background story:

And, just for fun, a silly promo featuring real pugs. Anyone traumatized by the sight of Pd patches, these should relax you.

More information at the developer site:
http://luckyframe.co.uk/pugsluvbeats/game.html