There’s a lot of hype around the latest schemes for changing how artists get their music to fans, but not actually a whole lot of news. (It always seems to boil down to a website with some unpronounceable name.)

Well, this is news: Harmonix is opening up Rock Band to anyone who wants their music in it, and giving you the same sophistication of tools they use themselves. That’s a real game-changer – literally.

And I don’t mean just for the actual game Rock Band. Sure, Harmonix was the house that made music games a phenomenon in the US. They learned well from Japan’s Masaya Matsuura, perfected music games’ mechanics in Amplitude and Frequency, popularized the formula by launching Guitar Hero, then rocked collaboration with Rock Band before convincing the infamously-guarded Beatles to finally embrace digital tech. But the sad reality of game music in general is that it’s been a playing field for the old guard – it’s licensing deals with major labels to promote music you’ve already heard. It’s the top hits on the radio, redigested onto your game console. There’s commercial calculation behind even the tune that’s in the background while you’re paging through a screen in Madden. Harmonix has already changed some of the economics, and disrupted even what could be a hit, as kids discover classic metal for the first time or geeks grab music by Jonathan Coulton and Stephen Colbert. But that’s not quite the disruptive shift in game music so many people have expected.

I think Rock Band Network could be the first real sign of that shift.

Rock Band Network promises to be something really different. How?

• Anyone can get their music in the game. You don’t even need a label. You need a few (cheap) software tools, a computer, and some basic MIDI chops, and for a fraction of the cost of pressing a couple hundred CDs, any artist can get their work into Rock Band 2.
• It’s a real community-driven process. Your A&R people don’t have to shmooze with MTV. You don’t have to enter into some complex developer agreement with Microsoft or Sony. There isn’t even a shady, mysterious review process like the Apple iTunes App Store. Actual Rock Band fans will get to play your music and tell you that the animation needs fixing and the difficulty level needs to be fixed on the drums.
• You use Reaper – an actual music production tool for grown-ups. Harmonix could have given us some weird in-game tool they cobbled together themselves. Instead, they give us a special verison of Reaper, the brilliant, full-blown Digital Audio Workstation that inexplicably costs just US$60 but blows the pants off a lot of better-known tools. So you actually get to assemble your music the way Harmonix has been doing for years, with a real tool. Fortunately, the process has been made much easier and copiously documented, but it’s nice to be treated like adults for a change.
• If it works, Rock Band is just the beginning. It’s impossible to see into the future. RBN is a leap of faith both in the artists and the game fans, in terms of their taste and the amount of effort they’ll invest. But if it works, Rock Band Network could change the way people think about interactive user-created content, well beyond just furniture in the Sims or Little Big Planet.

Anyway, enough of the big picture – let’s talk details. I got to sit down with the Rock Band Network team from Harmonix high above Times Square in MTV’s offices this week to get a full-blown demo – including some seriously fun nerding out with composer/sound designer Caleb Epps, plus Senior Producer Matthew Nordhaus and MTV’s games man, Paul DeGooyer. (In a sign that the big media world still doesn’t quite get what’s going on in this field, no one at the Viacom security desk had even heard of Harmonix.)

The team was extremely generous with technical details of Rock Band Network, and walked me through the process of how artists would get going with RBN. Here’s a first look at that process.

What You Need to Get Started

$60 Reaper + free plug-ins + a computer + Windows to beam over the music + an Xbox 360 to test on.

1. Reaper (Mac, Windows) For the authoring itself, you may be surprised: you don’t need some special tool. You use Cockos’ brilliant, lightweight, Reaper. It’s not even Reaper Rock Band Edition. Reaper for Mac will work, too. Cost: US$60 for the standard license, or US$225 if you’re already a huge rockstar.

http://www.reaper.fm/

2. Reaper plug-ins (Mac, Windows) Reaper plug-ins: this download is the real magic, adding everything from shortcuts for making tempo maps to color-coding tracks to helping you add lyrics, animations, and everything else that makes your song into a Rock Band track… game. Gamesong? Songgame? Cost: Free.

3. MAGMA Packaging Tool (Windows) MAGMA is a simple tool that facilitates getting those files packaged up with artwork and keywords and such, and moving them over to the Xbox 360 for testing yourself and for sharing with the rest of the community. It is Windows-only because it relies on Microsoft’s networking functionality with the console, but Harmonix says they’ve had no problem using it on the Mac via an emulator or Boot Camp. Cost: Free. (or the cost of Windows if you’re on the Mac).

4. Xbox Creators’ Club Membership: Join Microsoft’s game development community, and you get access to a special Rock Band creators area that lets you upload and share your tracks – and other tracks from other users (which is where item #5 comes in). Cost: $99 /year (Note that there are some discounted ways to get at this for shorter terms, and you get all the game developing features of the community, too, in case you want to try to make your own game in XNA.)

5. An Xbox 360 and Rock Band 2: You do want to actually play the results, right? (Unfortunately, because of the reliance on Creators Club, Sony’s PS3 isn’t yet supported, though some sort of PS3 distribution is planned for the future.) Cost: About to come down thanks to sales – and now you get to write off an Xbox 360 on your taxes.

Total cost: as little as $100-160 or so with the various pieces, or a little more if you need to pick up an Xbox 360 and the game and/or equip your Mac to run Windows.

By the way, Ars Technica claimed this month, based on the experience of one developer, that Xbox Live [is] not ready for user-generated content. That claim is simply wrong. Sure, LittleBigPlanet is cool on PS3, but the infrastructure for moderating content is there, on the community created for the XNA game development platform. And the tracks for Trails HD (the game mentioned in that article) or even LittleBigPlanet really pale in comparison to what Harmonix is about to unleash. It’s the first time a game has really been a platform, which was long the vision of Harmonix’s founders.

Now, let’s get into actually making your music.

The Tempo Map

Since Rock Band is assuming …well, a rock band, you’ll need to allign a tempo map with the audio so the software knows where the bars are. Caleb Epps showed me some of the nifty shortcuts that make moving from bar to bar snappy and automagical. Reaper itself has actually incorporated feature enhancements to accommodate the Rock Band workflow – which, in turn, means that the wider Reaper community may find improvements that impact them outside of preparing tracks for the game. I’ll cover this process in more detail once Harmonix unveils the wider beta.

MIDI Mapping and Animation

Here’s where the real work begins. When I visited Harmonix in Cambridge as they were developing the first Rock Band game, I found one guy hunched over a copy of Cubase doing just this: adding MIDI events for the game play at different skill levels. Now, in Reaper, you’re doing a process that’s just as sophisticated – it’s just much more user-friendly and quicker. (Harmonix says they’re gradually adopting the tools for the Rock Band Network internally, and some of their work already uses it.)

Especially nice: you’ll see color coding that matches the different game controllers.

MIDI isn’t just used for the notes in gameplay, though. You also add notes for the vocals, with the “+” key signifying a syllable extending across notes and another character designating notes that can’t be sung. (Bob Dylan, I’m looking at you.)

Most interestingly, you can tightly control animations, down to when the onscreen drummer chokes a hat or the camera cuts to the singer or the lighting in the venue activates, all using MIDI events. Check out the “Text Events” dropdown in the screen grab above.

If this sounds like a lot of work, it is. Fortunately, Harmonix says that the finished release will include tools that, say, allow the software to intelligently generate the animations. You can come back and tweak those if you wish, but you won’t necessarily have to manually add every single camera move – even though that’s traditionally how Harmonix does it.

All of this gets saved as standard MIDI files, so theoretically DAWs other than Reaper could perform the task, too – though for now, I can’t imagine wanting to leave Reaper, given the level of integration and documentation. But it’s nice that Harmonix hasn’t invented some crazy closed format, because if this takes off, I could see people creating other tools.

The Simulation

Now, if you had worked at Harmonix up until recently – as I saw when I did that first office tour – you’d then have to figure out how to get this song over to an Xbox console to play test it. Happily, you don’t have to do that any more. A convenient plug-in will pop up a graphical representation of any of the four parts. You can watch them animate through and get a real sense of what it’s like playing the game.

This is implemented as a standard plug-in, but the UI requires Reaper to work properly, so for now, it’s restricted to Reaper.

MAGMA and Play Testing

Good game design is all about play testing. So, when you’re distributing your music as a game, it’s essential that you actually play it as a game.

Yep, that’s right. This is the stage of the process where you have to play your Xbox. (Shame.)

MAGMA is the tool that packages in artwork and beams the track over to your Xbox 360 console. Provided your computer and your console are on the same network, the process of getting a built track to the Xbox is nearly instantaeous.

You can “audition games” locally, thanks to a patch to Rock Band 2 allows anyone with a Creators Club membership to play the games. That means you can easily test your own tracks on your Xbox, but also explore what other people are doing. And the community will ultimately determine which tracks are good enough to be approved.

In other words, if you don’t want to make your own Rock Band tracks, but want to become a virtual Xbox music “scout,” you could sign up for a membership and look for the next big thing by playing their music – interactively – on Rock Band.

That’s got to be better than dealing with all the CDs that usually show up in your mailbox.

The best part of all of this to me is that people can offer feedback. You can get through the first pass of your music, but then see how it’s playing with other people. Need to fix a camera angle? Dial down the difficulty on one level? Now you’ll get real feedback.

Interestingly, this also complements Microsoft’s other purpose for the Creators’ Club, which is to encourage independent game development using their elegantly-designed XNA game tools, some of which ultimately make it to Xbox Live Arcade. I think there’s actually a chance this could breathe some life (and users) into that service. Now, if only Microsoft would build more robust audio tools into the game toolkit so some crazy indie developer can built the next Frequency or Amplitude …but I digress.

Q&A

Anticipating the kind of questions you may be asking yourself…

When does it all happen? The network is now in closed beta. A larger beta is planned for next month, with a full launch expected around October.

So who will use all of this? I think there will be several groups:

1. Indie bands with tech savvy.

2. Indie bands who aren’t tech savvy, who will learn Reaper to get this working – and wind up using Reaper and other computer audio tools to produce their next album. (Harmonix promises extensive documentation to give them a hand. I’m sure CDM can help, too.)

3. Electronic artists who build a cottage business around prepping other people’s tracks.

4. Game developers and game fans who pick this stuff up because they love Rock Band, and wind up getting further into music.

And while 1-3 are certainly interesting to CDM, I hope we get to interract with people in that fourth category.

Isn’t this going to be too hard for some people?

Yup. Yup, it is. On the other hand, Harmonix is going to great lengths to make this easier – and if you are a skilled MIDI sequencer, you’ve just found a business opportunity.

I’ve got a Mac and a PS3.

Don’t sweat it. A lot of the Harmonix folks are Mac users, alongside the happy Windows users. It could be well worth running in an emulator or a second partition, and you can still do all your music production on the Mac. As for the PS3 – well, you can either make friends with an Xbox owner, or watch for the sale I hope is coming. You do need a hard drive, but otherwise this seems a reasonable investment.

Will I get paid?

We’ll talk more about this in a future story, but yes – thanks to the Xbox Creators Club payment infrastructure, you can expect to get paid early and often (payments arrive quarterly), meaning this could be a decent revenue stream at a time when they’re hard to find.

Performance licensing is apparently not applicable to Rock Band (I did ask about that); that’s, again, a topic for a separate article.

What if my instrumentation doesn’t fit Rock Band?

Check out the Rock Band catalog. There’s some flexibility here, as long as the game play works. You just need to make it work for the default setup so that people with a mic, a guitar, a bass, and a drum kit in front of their TV can have a good time.

And as I talked to Harmonix, we talked about the fact that previously unavailable genres could look really fantastic in the game – yes, Norwegian Death Metal, your time has come! (Now, if we just got vocal harmonies as in The Beatles…)

I also expect some really, really odd submissions in the community. (“The World’s Hardest Rock Band Track,” anyone?)

Meanwhile, I’m hoping that Harmonix will re-release their back catalog, Frequency and Amplitude, on Xbox Live Arcade, and then doubly hoping they’ll let people author for them, for all of us fans of electronic music with unusual instrumentations, and the unusual gameplay mechanic of those games. (Their new PSP game, incidentally, quietly returns to that game style.)’

On the other hand, I don’t expect Harmonix to do everything here. If this works, Rock Band could be just the beginning.

Changing the World of Music

Harmonix has long talked about wanting to create a “platform” for music, but I think it’s really Rock Band Network that could get them there. Rock Band alone can’t be the exclusive future of interactive music – that’d be boring. But if Harmonix pulls this off, it could be a real catalyst for transforming all recordings into an interactive experience – not just the established hit parade we’ve already seen. And that’s utterly huge.

I also think it’ll be well worth the time of CDM to watch as this evolves. We talk a lot about alternative controllers, about interaction design, about the merging spheres of games and music, but also about musical integrity and creativity and new outlets for spreading musical material. Rock Band Network could bring all of those ideas into mainstream consciousness in new ways.

And, oh yeah – it’ll be a heck of a lot of fun to play those tracks, and to get people playing your music. Stay tuned.

Sign up for the beta and get more information here:

http://creators.rockband.com/

Gibson, the guitar company, has been on an utterly absurd campaign against music games, bringing lawsuits against the developers of both Guitar Hero and Rock Band and even against retailers. In the latest illustration of how screwed up patent law is, and just how over-litigious it has made technology in this country, the patent was based on a Gibson patent for a “System and method for generating and controlling a simulated musical concert experience.” Never mind that Gibson’s patent looks nothing like Guitar Hero, or that if interpreted that loosely, Gibson could theoretically sue any music software maker.

See my previous break-down of the patent and the twisted logic of the case:
Gibson Guitar to Guitar Hero Maker: We Own All Digital Musical Reality

And following development:
Gibson Guitar Loses Mind, Sues Entire Planet

Our friend Nilay Patel gets the scoop at Engadget that Gibson has lost its Guitar Hero case in California US District Court. Engadget also has a PDF of the decision:

Gibson loses Guitar Hero patent lawsuit, gets booed off stage

You can read juicy bits in the final ruling (PDF):

• Gibson’s own counsel withdrew from the case after the guitar maker refused their request for information. That’s right: Gibson wasn’t cooperating with their own lawyers. (Gibson later was represented by different counsel.)
• Gibson’s own corporate general counsel didn’t respond to requests from the court.
• Gibson started trying to force third-party Activision system providers to provide short-notice depositions, much to the dismay of the court and ACtivision, given Gibson’s own lack of cooperation.
• Gibson tried to use a YouTube video of a Guitar Hero hacker on the record, which the court found irrelevant (and, I think, laughable.)
• Gibson variously tried, unsuccessfully, legal gymnastics by which it could redefine musical instruments to enforce its ultimately irrelevant patent.

It’s also fun reading lawyers try to define what a musical instrument is in the context of this case. Ultimately, the determining factor in this case appears to be whether the musical instrument itself produces some kind of audio signal, not control signal. Yep, that’s right: it sounds like Gibson lost out because the Guitar Hero controller was defined as a controller but not an instrument. The court decision, showing unusual technical savvy, notes that the “Musical Instrument Digital Interface” (which they incorrectly call “device interface”) has been used for non-musical purposes, despite its name. In a fit of extreme hubris, Gibson at one point seems to have claimed ownership of MIDI for guitar controllers, despite prior art.

I’m certainly not qualified to interpret the judgment, but we can say this: Gibson lost. And they lost on almost every single point, from apparently abusing the court process to losing just about every detail they tried to prove. The court even says the Gibson arguments “border on the frivolous.”

The extent of their loss says to me the other cases have about a snowball’s chance, which raises the question of what Gibson was trying to accomplish in the first place. You have to wonder if they hoped intimidating legal action could help them win contract terms. But it’s nice to see the law win out — and raises hopes that, in the long run, legal remedies could eventually fix frivolous abuses of the patent system.

Oh, yeah – and we can all be relieved that Gibson neither owns the idea of making things look like guitars, nor musical simulation. Phew.

It’s official: we had heard rumblings that game maker Harmonix was about to announce something, and it’s here. It’s a collaboration directly with the Beatles to make something that isn’t Rock Band or Guitar Hero — something completely new. And something completely new is exactly what’s needed.

Before Guitar Hero and Rock Band, before being purchased by MTV/Viacom, game developer Harmonix were a very different creative house. Co-founders Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy were MIT friends whose first project was an application that let you play guitar with a joystick. (Sounds like a research project you might read about here.) Their interactive music games were influenced by the explosion of Japanese titles like PaRappa the Rapper and Beatmania, to be sure. But part of what made FreQuency and Amplitude so important was that they offered more than just a simplified music experience. They were digitally-powered acid trips, with VJ-style video clips playing up buildings and surprisingly sophisticated interfaces that remixed the music as you played.

Make no mistake about it: Guitar Hero and Rock Band are brilliant titles with a fair dose of musical integrity in the way they abstract playing experiences for broader audiences. But there’s no question some of the original creativity — the sense that the game experience was unlike any other experience — is missing. And in this pumped-up HD age, in which surreal game experiences like intra-dimensional navigation in Portal or ambient floating cartoon paramecia in Spore, it’s hard to wonder if gamers who weren’t ready to snap up FreQuency a few years ago might be ready now.

So while rival Activision bakes a watered-down GarageBand-style app into another iteration of Guitar Hero, it’s intriguing, at least, that Harmonix is working with the Beatles. And they really are working with surviving Beatles and Beatles Significant Others: Sir Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono Lennon, and Olivia Harrison. (Okay, I’d like to see a special Yoko-inspired game on Xbox Live Arcade.) Most interesting, producer Giles Martin, heir to production legend Sir George Martin
and producer of the Love project with Cirque due Soleil, twice a Grammy winner, and the man behind The Beatles Anthology is involved, too. (See a great story on him in Sound on Sound.)

Let’s get straight to the point: for the band that made virtual acid trips mainstream decades ago, it’s time for a new, digital trip. (They do describe it as a “journey” through the Beatles’ work, after all.) I think the Beatles make a perfect choice. I can’t count the number of people I know in music composition who were addicted to Beatles records as kids — not the Beatles’ generation, but their offspring in the 80s and 90s.

And despite the intervening decades, Yellow Submarine still looks imaginative and bizarre. If gaming can do anything, it can take music we’ve heard a zillion times and make it new. It can make our regular experience, the reality around us feel a little different. Rock Band has proven to be a trojan horse: it’s literally driven up sales of real instruments. That’s proof that making something palatable to a mass market can help get them hooked on new kinds of experiences. Can a Beatles game feel less like interactive documentary or re-hashed Guitar Hero, and more like a groovy, retro journey into the strange imagination that turned a lot of us on to recording, music, visuals, and … uh … animations of strange creatures? I think so. Can’t wait to see what comes out.

PS — I want to play as George.

A new version of Rock Band (for Wii) means still more ways to turn these game controllers into musical or visual performance instruments. Jordan Balagot writes with some hands-on experience using junXion, a wonderful tool for adapting game controllers to MIDI or OpenSoundControl. (junXion also works with Wiimotes and nunchucks, audio inputs and pitch sensors, joysticks and standard USB devices, and much more, so even if this bores you, you’ve probably got some use for it.)

Jordan says:

I tried plugging in the Rockband for Wii guitar and drums into my mac and Junxion recognized them perfectly. This seems to be the easiest solution for turning the rockband instruments into real instruments because it has low latency and the Wii instruments are already USB.

Full instructions at his blog:
Turn Wii Rock Band Instruments into Real Instruments with Junxion

junXion is wonderful, though that EUR75 stings here thanks to the weak US dollar and the fact that we have fewer grants and have to pay for health insurance and hospital visits and whatnot. (Especially any Wii-related injuries.) There are other ways of getting at this data, as it’s USB HID — try Osculator on Mac or GlovePIE on Windows, not to mention HID input in Max/MSP and Pd. That said, junXion remains a very powerful option and worth a look.

Other Rock Band controller tips?

We’re still anxiously awaiting what our friend David Lublin of VJ app developer vidvox does with his — as pictured below. (He was searching through createdigitalmusic looking for tips, so, erm, I’ll be sure to update the site with whatever he finds!) Expect some drum kits triggering videos. (Photo by Todd Thille.)

“Finally, the name Gibson will be synonymous with fake guitars.”

Gibson Sues Over Guitar Hero

Thanks, Patrick.

Gibson Guitar may require a new column here on CDM, titled something like “what the $&*((*&$ can you possibly be thinking??!”

Sure, it was strange enough when Gibson started a patent dispute with Guitar Hero game developer Activision because it claimed to own the patent for anything “simulating a musical concert experience.” (Jeez, I’m glad Gibson hasn’t been to a couple of my gigs.) Never mind that their patent involved pre-recorded concert footage and a head-mounted virtual reality apparatus and had no similarity whatsoever to Guitar Hero. Never mind that they’ve waited years into this franchise, almost a decade into their patent, and over a decade into music games to both to notice.

Now things get weirder.

Gibson is suing Harmonix, developer of Rock Band. (Unlike Guitar Hero, Rock Band appears to lack a Gibson instrument license — but the suit covers Gibson’s supposed game patents, not Gibson’s guitars.)

And they’re suing Viacom, because Viacom is Harmonix’s corporate parent.

And they’re suing Electronic Arts, the publisher.

And they’re suing GameStop. And Amazon.com. And Toys ‘R Us. And Target. And Kmart.

And they’re suing Wal-Mart. (Oh, I’m sure that will end well. I can’t imagine Wal-Mart is a big outfit with armies of lawyers or anything like that.)

Joystiq has some coverage of the situation:

Gibson sues Harmonix, Viacom, EA over Guitar Hero

Gibson lays lawsuit on GameStop, other major retailers

At this point, I’d do a little evil air guitar solo to provide a soundtrack to this whole story, except I’m fairly certain Gibson might sue me for simulating a musical performance.

Hey, Gibson — got a little tip for you. Guitar Center also sells Rock Band. Any reason you’re not suing them? Ah, okay, at least at some point some surviving sense of self interests intervenes.

It’s ironic, too, because other manufacturers see these wildly-popular music games as very good for music making. Rock Band and Guitar Hero were all over the NAMM show floor, partly because of companies picking up endorsements, but partly because musicians seem to like playing the game. It’s advertising for instruments, for music gear, for — music lessons, frankly, for any time people want to learn how to play beyond the game. And it doesn’t appear to violate any Gibson intellectual property — especially with a license for Gibson’s stuff in both games.

Cheer Up, Kids!

Okay, so Gibson is embarrassing the entire music instruments industry. On a happier note, Nintendo Wii owners get to play Rock Band June 22. (via Joystiq) And that’ll be good fun — and will unleash the hardware on the Nintendo-loving game hackers out there, meaning Synth Hero or Chiptune Hero could follow in homebrew form shortly thereafter.

Real music making — also a very fun way to pass the time. Try it with friends.

What’s not fun? Lawsuits. “Lawsuit Hero” will not be coming to an Xbox 360 / PS3 soon.

Updated: I incorrectly said Gibson sued Activision; that’s not true. Activision actually pre-emptively sued Gibson to try to invalidate their patent after Gibson threatened Activision with a patent violation and tried to get partners to “license” their supposed patent. As readers have noted, this is a bizarre case of biting the hand that feeds, given that Gibson had partnered with Activision on the game’s hardware, software, and promotion. Wired.com has a good write-up:

Gibson Sues Viacom, EA Over Rock Band (Update)

Suffice to say, this could have a chilling effect on the entire music software development community if Gibson wins. Everything from indie music games to Apple’s MainStage could be said to simulate music performance.

They’ve gone about as fer as they can go …

Yes, just when you thought you’d seen every conceivable take on mods, customizations, clones, homages, robots, artistic reinterpretations, and other cultural artifacts inspired by Guitar Hero, there’s this — a Guitar Hero clone on Commodore 64.

There’s a lot of chatting at the beginning, but jump about five minutes in for the payoff: the Legend of Zelda Overworld theme with deliciously low-fi graphics. (All due respects to Harmonix and new Guitar Hero developers Activision, but I might point out the interface actually doesn’t need an Xbox 360.)

We’re mixing 8-bit systems here (Nintendo and Commodore), but clearly a full 8-bit collection is due. And there’s still further evidence that the Commodore 64 is the digital music platform that will outlive all the rest. Have to boot up my machine and do a C64 feature month or something one of these days.

Details, downloads at creator Toni Westbrook’s site. Toni’s no one-hit wonder, either — dig philosophical musings on adventure gaming and programming, SQL tricks (seriously), and a do-everything interface for PlayStation controllers that allows them to be used with a variety of classic hardware.

Thanks to Josh Randall (who works for some company called Harmonix — hey, when are you guys finally going to release a C64 version?) and Yarnivore for the tip.

Imagine this: you have a real-time interface that must be responsive and satisfying, simple enough to be approachable, but sophisticated enough that you’ll want to finely hone your skills over time. You’ll juggle a variety of elements to control with split-second accuracy, but even with elaborate mechanics under the hood, the whole thing, above all, has to be fun.

Sound familiar? It’s a description that’s equally apt for traditional music instruments and modern music software, as much as it is for games. The fact that, once they’re done, a game is often very not like familiar music software and instruments suggests the range of possible solutions to these design challenges. And suddenly, after years in which the games industry clung conservatively to tied and tested models, indie game designers with oddball game designs are grabbing the headlines. Some continue to tackle the meeting point of game and music making. Others offer inspiration for what futuristic 3D musical interfaces might look like.

I unfortunately didn’t make it to the game developer pow-wow that is GDC, but our friend Josh Randall at Harmonix tipped us off with these top picks. Given the blog buzz they’re earning, you may have seen some already, proving great independent game design may not be constrained to obscurity any longer.

Some games are playable on Windows now; Mac users may want to hit up Boot Camp, or watch for release on a console near you. (The pattern seems to be, prototype on PC but ship on consoles where better money can be made.)

Fez, pictured above, is here for two reasons. One, it promises some brilliant game mechanics. The Wii addition to the Paper Mario series from Nintendo suggested some of the game play mechanics of switching from 2D to 3D. Most of the actual execution only hinted at the possibilities. Fez goes further, with mind-bending shifts from two to three dimensions. Rather than see the lack of depth perception in imagined game worlds as a limitation, it makes it part of the game play — and reminds us of the gap in perception in 2D and 3D worlds, something that should raise the attention of anyone doing interface design (musical, sonic, or otherwise). The second reason is simple — the retro-tinged music score, apparently from producer/musician Jason DeGroot, sounds brilliant. Follow the game’s development at Kokoromi’s site:

Fez @ Kokoromi

Audiosurf perhaps got the most attention in the music games category. Pop in music from your collection, and race through a score generated by the music. It’s tough to resist this one at US$9.95 from Steam, especially for game music fans — the soundtrack from The Orange Box is included. The game is described thusly:

Audiosurf is a music-adapting puzzle racer where you use your own music to create your own experience. The shape, the speed, and the mood of each ride is determined by the song you choose. You earn points for clustering together blocks of the same color on the highway, and compete with others on the internet for the high score on your favorite songs.

And it’s got lots of extras: characters, strategy, and Steam Acheivements support. My only disappointment in this game is that the actual gameplay mechanic doesn’t deviate much from games we’ve already seen — though, then again, if you miss the design of Harmonix’s earlier Amplitude or Frequency from the days before Guitar Hero and Rock Band, this brings back the fun “interactive racer.” But I do hope that as indie developers come up with a truly interactive music remixer for the age of Ableton Live — and perhaps some fly mechanics that don’t come straight out of Wipeout XL. Not that either of those is likely to stop me from playing with Audiosurf, mind you.

Audiosurf @ Steam

PS – Audiosurf wins major extra points for being available now, which a lot of this other, tantalizing stuff is not.

With so many games focusing on making music into games, Fret Nice takes a different approach: it’s a platformer that allows you to play the game “as if it was a rock song.” Currently in prototype phase, it already looks terrific visually. Unlike Nintendo’s somewhat flawed attempt to do platformers with its bongo controller, the physical movement looks satisfying. And back to what this could mean for musicians, it is evocative of what could be possible with futuristic, interactive music scores.

Fret Nice

Available now in an early-ish build for Windows, the frenetic Synesthete is perhaps the most ambitious of the games here as far as mechanics. Yes, some of the conventions of rhythmic music games are there — synchronized motions and falling bricks. But rather than resist that convention, Synesthete explodes it onto an isometric-projection gameboard, with power-ups and magical charm blasts and … well, have a look at the video. It looks as though you’ve jacked into the brain-powered computer system in Ghost in the Shell.

Synesthete

Crayon Physics is not a music game, but I’ll close on it because, like Fez, it’s notable for its soundtrack and its gameplay / interface design. The design has you solving puzzles by drawing physics-driven illustrations, as the name suggests — if you enjoyed our look at new music interfaces built in Processing, you’ll draw (ahem, sorry) plenty of inspiration from this. And, of course, it’s very possible to do stuff like this in Processing, Flash, and the like, and make a game that’s a musical or sonic interface. The music in question in this game demonstrates the potential of Creative Commons music, making use of a non-commercial license for the lovely Lullaby by _ghost on open music site ccMixter. Think that’s just giving your money away? Think again: many bands actually pay for exposure in big-budget games. In this case, the artist just got a load of publicity along with the game — and since it’s a non-commercial license, such things could lead to commercial collaborations in the future.

Oh, and most importantly, the game is fun. (The prototype is available, but a higher-quality game is forthcoming)

Crayon Physics @ Kloonigames (original prototype)

Crayon Physics Deluxe (the version shown at the Independent Game Festival)

Got some indie — or vintage, or otherwise — games that inspire you musically / interactively? Let us know.

GamePad Companion (US$15 shareware)

Of course, the nice thing here is that the basic steps apply to other controllers, just in case Rock Band doesn’t float your boat (or rock your socks, or whatever).

I ended up choosing kick, snare, two toms and one cymbal, since the other cymbal I wanted was in a inactive area of the keyboard. I re-mapped the keys in GPC, switched back to GB and gave it a try. Success! Samples were triggered correctly, the fast key repeat rate didn’t cause any problems, and latency was basically nil.

The results:

And step by step instructions:
GarageRockBand [billpendry.com blog]

More good news: Bill has updated the post with information on Xbox 360 controller possibilities. Generic Xbox controllers work just find via the Wireless Gaming Receiver. No word yet on the Rock Band controllers, though, and I think they do a little more than the standard controllers. Anyone got an Xbox 360 and a Mac who can tell us if it works?

Previously:
Game Day: Use Rock Band Drums as MIDI Controller – Windows, Yes, Mac, Soon? (and I guess we got our answer!)

But maybe the real message of Rock Band’s success is that musicians need some friends to jam with. Witness what happens to MTV Multiplayer blogger Tracey John when she tries to play all four instruments at once:

‘Rock Band’ Challenge — One Woman, Four Instruments, At The Same Time [MTV Multiplayer]

Funny, this is roughly what I looked like trying to play just one guitar in my play test at Harmonix in August. Doh. (I’m holding out for Herbie Hancock Presents Keyboard Hero any day now.)

In all seriousness, the multiplayer aspect of Rock Band is its killer feature. My prediction: back here in music land, while the computer music emphasis remains on one-man-bands, more multi-computer, multi-player jamming functionality could be the wave of the future. In the meantime, I’ll continue to wrangle two or three or five computers in performance at once — probably with similar effects.