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

“You had to be there.” Live performance has always been dictated by being present in a particular place, at a particular time. Now, the same is true of an interactive album produced by brothers Hays and Ryan Holladay, aka Bluebrain.

Both a two-man band and a two-man development team, there’s no clear dividing line between “coder” and “musician” for the artists on this project. But the only way to hear the work is to physically go to Washington, D.C.’s National Mall, and begin walking around. The satellites that populate the GPS received in your smartphone, currently on iOS but with an Android release planned, realize the work. You, and your device, then, participate in a kind of performance. The album is the first of a series; New York’s Flushing Meadows, site of a World’s Fair and a failed Olympics bid, is next.

The Washington Post‘s Chris Richards talk with the two artists; I’m quoted as the story pans back to look at music technology in general:
Bluebrain make magic with the world’s first location aware album [Washington Post]

It’s well worth a full read, as the artists describe some of their intentions, and claim they’re uninterested in this as technological gimmick. Richards also explains the experience of hearing the work, since not all of us can go to DC:

Approach that crazy-looking thing while listening to “The National Mall,” and you’ll hear a keyboard weep. Get closer and digital cellos begin to trace a regal melody. Closer. There’s percussion. Keep going. The volume creeps up. The drums push toward anarchy. Walk right up to the monument, press your hand against the cool, smooth stone and listen, as if the obelisk were a giant radio needle receiving some riotous transmission from deep space.

At one point when Richards interviewed me for the story, he asked me point blank whether technology’s greater impact has been on distribution or production. Caught off guard – it’s a question so fundamental I hadn’t really thought to choose – I found myself choosing production. After all, while distribution has been profound, the advent of recording, not the advent of the computer, is the fundamental breakthrough. But with computer music software, the ability to re-imagine what music actually is has taken the grandest leap since the gramophone.

Ironically, though, Bluebrain are taking the same approach to conventional recording technology as they are the new smartphone – they’re intervening to ensure music is limited and local. A “surprise” record release earlier this year not only went straight-to-vinyl (see previous editorial here), but required that you go to an actual store in the DC area.

In vinyl, the approach is an intentional throwback. In digital, it suggests a new way of making music for a space with a device as the medium rather than live performance.

There have certainly been locative digital works before this one, but I couldn’t think of one that was introduced as an album in this way. Then again, if the idea is worthwhile, it may prove worth repeating.

Follow Bluebrain’s work via their blog and site (and you may have to literally follow it, geographically):
http://bluebrainmusic.blogspot.com/
http://bluebra.in/

And do point us to other examples of locative work – including anything that might challenge their claim of being first, at least for our historical benefit.

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.

And we’re having a music party, as well. Martin Roth and I will be making noises with Android; I hope to show in a couple of minutes why taking Pd mobile could be a powerful option for musicians. Also in the lineup, some fantastic Swedish artists: Anders Ilar (Pinesky), Pavan, (Flogsta Dancehall), and my own favorite, Håkan Lidbo (Container/P2 Ström). Flyer below. For those of you music hardware and software developers in Stockholm – you know who you are – hope you can make it out. (See also: Facebook.) It’s open to all, not just Android Only conference attendees.

Since the vast majority of you aren’t in Stockholm, I’ll try to bring as much of this to you as I can on Music and Motion by next week.

From the blog:

Samantha Kalman
I’m most thrilled about the new audio features. Big things like fx filters and reverb zones to add atmosphere to your audio are awesome, but little things like reliable synching of multiple playing sources is completely wonderful. Combined with spectrum analysis you can do things like procedurally modify colors, meshes, lighting, or anything else based on audio playback. As someone who wants to make synaesthesia-invoking music games, I am so happy that these features made it into 3.0.

Nicolaj Schweitz
I love the new audio features, especially the possibility to use audio to affect any runtime variable. I can’t wait to see what people get out of this.

The mod tracker file support might start a new epoch in music for games — or should I say a revival of the demo scene trackers.

Unity 3 – What Feature is The Dev Team Most Proud Of? [Unity blog]

Thanks to Zyler Vega for the tip!

From Unity’s site, a description of the “Audio Magic” coming in version 3:

Unity 3 brings Reverb Zones, filters, tracker file support and a bunch of other goodies to the table. We’re also introducing editable falloff curves for all major audio parameters, so you get complete control over your sound ambience.

More on the upgrade at Create Digital Motion.

Tim Exile, talented musician, Reaktor guru, and mad genius of interactive live performance, has started a video blog. It’s tough to describe what’s covered in the video, other than to say Tim is starting more or less an open house in his brain, which can only lead to good things. He talks live, music making, and his current plans, including a tasty-sounding open studio series in London. And through the whole thing, he has a Lite-Brite-style visualization he programmed in Reaktor, well beyond what I’ve ever been able to make Reaktor do.

It’s clearly more Tim talking directly to fans than a properly-formatted video blog, but it is starting a conversation, meaning if there’s something you’d like to see Tim do with the medium of video, now’s the time to tell him.

“Interactive music … well, well, well…”

Ten minutes. Four or five kids (or adults). Make a song. Go.

That’s the idea behind the Youth Music Box, developed by Silent Studios and Chris O’Shea. (Our friend Chris you may recall from various interactive projects and the blog pixelsumo; he sends this project our way.) The software is build in openFrameworks, the C++-based creative coding environment for artists.

With keys, drums, and yes, even a scratching DJ-style interface, the music box brings together kids for quick music making, inspired by the phenomenon of musical games. The experience is guided by genre, with some effort to make sure whatever they do sounds good, but it’s extraordinary how effective it is at conveying the experience of the successful jam. It’s a bit of a confidence builder, in other words, for a group musical experience, perhaps more so than those ear-splitting, cheap plastic recorder consorts I recall from my youth.

And oh yeah, those kids look super cute once they get rocking out. (See video below.)

Youth Music Box Experience from Silent Studios | Resonate on Vimeo.

All of this raises some fascinating questions, and not always with the answers you might expect. In a normal musical ensemble, you begin sounding like crap, amp up difficulty, and eventually sound something like this – at least as far as coherence goes, assuming you’re not aiming for experimental free jazz. But with the addition of technology, whether musical games or the presets on our favorite synths or the quantization and beat-synced loops of our sequencers, it goes something in reverse. You start out sounding like this, pull apart the mechanisms that make you sound a certain way, and eventually find your way to your own personal approach. (And at some point, you get some of the readers on this site, writing code to produce their own sounds and musical structures line by line.) In fact, one could imagine scaling difficulty of even this particular setup, gradually adding greater musical freedom and taking away the “training wheels” of all the rules-based restrictions that make the results sound a particular way.

Skeptical about the connection of music-based games and actual music making? Think again – even as music education unravels worldwide, games are actually encouraging real music. That revelation was the impetus of the music box project:

Research commissioned by Youth Music found that up to 2.5 million young people in the UK – or 1 million aged between 12 and 18 – have been inspired to progress into ‘real’ music-making because they have played music-based console games.

You got it – they hit those plastic buttons, got inspired, got bored, then decided to go to the real thing. And otherwise, they might have remained passive musical consumers: the game was a gateway drug. Of course, that means that any such interactive experience has to stand up to polished Guitar Hero and Rock Band-style games. But anyone who believes the music games genre has peaked and is on its way out may be dead wrong on many, many levels. On the contrary, this may only be getting started – and the real growth could come in music beyond the realm of games, as people graduate to the unlimited set of possible music experiences.

Chris sends lots more documentation of this project, if you’d like to learn more:

by silent studios and me for uk charity youth music to get kids turned on to music
http://www.vimeo.com/6210259

watch some bbc coverage here
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_8160000/newsid_8168800/8168881.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8154449.stm

Ed.: The video at top doesn’t play outside the UK, because we don’t pay BBC license fees. What, all those Doctor Who videos I bought in the 80s and 90s didn’t make up for it?

here is a press release from roland. the box is ‘powered by roland’
http://www.audioprointernational.com/news/1329/Roland-unveils-Music-Box-for-Youth-Music

some launch pics
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixelsumo/sets/72157621466657993/

making of pics
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixelsumo/sets/72157621404410234/

this goes into some of the ideas and details about the musical kit
http://musicispower.youthmusic.org.uk/blog/24/youthmusicboxlaunchesatlondonssouthbankcentre/

on the website there is a very simplified flash version you can try out on a mini timeline, just click play online

its quite funny to read these comments on it
http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2009/07/youth-music-box-democratizes-music-creation.html

And yes, you can try this yourself and play online! The official site:

http://musicispower.youthmusic.org.uk/youth_music_box/

The production company:

http://www.silentstudios.co.uk/

And Chris’ own site:

http://www.chrisoshea.org/

Roland is involved, and donated an E-09 Interactive Music Arranger to give kids some toys to explore.

And yes, I did notice a certain kindred spirit in the form of Moldover’s Octamasher. The underlying technology and its results are different, but to me what’s most interesting isn’t the superficial similarity of these projects, but the fact that they array the instruments in a circle. Computer production often simply orients a single person to a screen – not so ideal for collaboration. And even Rock Band and Guitar Hero, like an onstage band, line up artists for a (now nonexitent) audience. Perhaps the circle is about to make a comeback as music restores its social aspect.

Curious to hear other thoughts on these projects as they evolve.

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!

Eno had Music for Airports. It’s fitting that Monolake would do Music for Jet Lag. Robert Henke writes about this month’s free download:

Since I also have been flying a lot recently, I named it after one of the most annoying side effects of modern transportation and mixed it in a way that reflects that dizzy feeling of being hyper active and totally asleep at the same time. ( "Last call for mister Robert Henke, flying to Berlin, please come to gate B 154 IMMEDIATELY or we will unload your luggage !!!!!!!!!" )

I am myself recovering from jetlag on the way to Portugal, so the timing is perfect. In a way, I have to say I sometimes oddly enjoy the disorienting feeling. I don’t think it’d be terribly addictive, but it’s a physical, profound reminder of traveling a great distance, something you could otherwise ignore in the age of absurdly-fast jet travel.

Grab the download here:

Free Downloads of the Month [yetlag, May 2009 – should be archived if you’re catching this late]

Installation details:

http://monolake.de/installations/lufthansa.html

The installation is fascinating in itself: a Max/MSP-powered, interactive sound score for a giant flight simulator, a model of the presence of jets, travel, and air traffic control. Robert did the sound; Christopher Bauder of white void was the concept and very elegant visual design. (See also Aaron Koblin’s striking Processing-based visual piece Flight Patterns, which seems to have embedded itself on a certain airborne digital zeitgeist. The United States becomes a feathery web of connections and flying traffic. You can imagine how this might continue to be mined in sound.)

As we work to keep our creative process flowing, I especially love the idea of focusing on a feeling to get a production started, as Monolake did here. So often, it’s too easy to get caught up in something technical or some very particular idea, then lose that in the process. By focusing on a feeling or deeper sentiment, it’s possible to remain connected to the ethos of what the track really means to us.

Of course, travel too much, and that may just wind up being … well, jet lag.

Meanwhile, as I listen to more music piped through airport terminals and even Metro stations, I wish Eno’s original idea had caught on.

In the thrilling conclusion of our chat with Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin, Matt Ganucheau and I explore deep thoughts about the roles of interactivity and adaptivity in music and game design — then attempt to dance in giants Katamari Damacy hats. (Note the use of the word attempt — those things were more than a bit tricky to move in. Hilarity ensues.)

Prior to leading a dance dance Revolución, we talk a bit about the ways in which game design relate to gesture in musical interface and how musical scores could become non-linear. The gesture issue really goes well beyond games to the fundamental question of how to relate to music physically — and, in a way, awkwardly-dancing musicians may be a fitting metaphor. Or parable. Or something or other.

We do it all for you.

I really did find this a fascinating way to promote discussion, so if you’ve got suggestions for future broadcasts, I’d love to hear them. You can even think of new silly things for us / guests to do.

See also, related:
Troels Folmann on the boiled waterphone-style instrument, sound design inspiration
Troels on “micro-scoring” adaptive music

For part the first:
GDC: Music, Video Games, and Interactivity – Chat with Boing Boing Video