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/

Load up an Ableton set or mix samples, and you’re already in the domain of interactive music. With joysticks and arcade buttons and other controls, the blending of game and musical interface into generative compositional fusion is even clearer. It’s little wonder many electronic musicians take an interest in the nexus of gaming and music.

Any discussion of interactive music scores for games would be incomplete without Jonathan Mak. His self-produced title Everyday Shooter used classic top-down space combat as a musical experience: not only do sound effects in the game act as musical elements, but even the flow of the game itself fits into a generated song structure. Mak even imagined the title as an album. Playing through it, once you get into the groove of the action, the roles of gamer and listener merge into a single flow. (See video, at end.) Another nice feature – breaking from cliche, it’s a music game that employs guitar lacks in place of, say, a pounding trance soundtrack.

Now, Mak turns his attentions from space shooter to platformer, with SoundShapes, on the console Sony announced this week, the PlayStation Vita. It’s best to watch the video to see what’s going on. It’s just a taste; we’ll have to see the final title.

There’s more good news, too: on of our favorite artists, the inventive i am robot and proud, is the musical collaborator. And you can now look to Toronto as a hotbed of indie game action – take that, Montreal and New York – with i am robot and proud and the team behind iPad album-as-game-as-album Swords & Sworcery.

The effects of making ever game event musical can be cartoonish at times – though, perhaps in a game, that’s part of the pleasure and aesthetic. But in Mak’s best moments, it was as though he was composing with gameplay – canonical gameplay forms as a modern, digital parallel to musical forms like a sonata.

We’ll be watching. Thanks to Metehan Korkmazel for the tip!

Via GameSetWatch, who have some nice analysis. (One point of disagreement – they speculate this will be onstage “in the hands of at least one chiptunes performer.” I think that’s actually relatively unlikely; chip music artists continue to prefer dedicated music tools, not games. Laptop artists would occasionally feature an ElectroPlankton cameo. But I’ve been fiddling with some Processing sketches that try to make game interfaces for music. It’s fun, if really hard; I’ll keep trying. Seems a good airport layover project.)

Previously on CDM:
Portal 2′s Musical World, Available Free, in Non-Adaptive Form “For Testing” [ Also makes use of interactive musical accompaniment ]

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

What if, between the original classic Tron and the upcoming Tron 2: Legacy, there were another Tron movie, lost forever in cinematic history? Between the soaring score by Wendy Carlos for the original and Legacy’s Daft Punk music, what would the soundtrack have sounded like? Of course, it would have absolutely had some Journey in it.

Such a movie was rumored, but as with so many projects, leaves behind no evidence. What if it had left a score you could hear? The mysterious “Flynn 1.5″ writes to share a free, downloadable soundtrack that answers that question.

And you can argue with an album that begins out with “For the Love of ENCOM”? Indeed. You can stream the full album and download all but the Journey remix. Read the full “backstory” after the jump.

Tron moniker or no, the results are some lovely music, featuring the likes of Tiger Mendoza, Team9, artist and CDM regular reader Lilith The Kitten, and ringleader World Famous Audio Hacker, among others. (Trivia – Tiger Mendoza has his own, Creative Commons-licensed album, and Team9 earned notoriety for a mash-up collaboration with Green Day.)

In late 1998, I was commissioned to compile and produce the soundtrack for a sequel to the film “Tron”. A draft of the story had already been written and early filming had begun (as reported by ZDNet on July 27, 1999). As I understand it, the film was kept in great confidence with the producers as Pixar was still in negotiations with Disney about the responsibilities of the production teams.

“Rise Of The Virals” was a fantastic, but much darker storyline from the original — different from the “Into The Machine” pitch made to Disney by another party. It involved updating the ENCOM universe to a networked system (thanks to the Internet), but also created a darker world — full of programs abandoned as buggy systems (or “mutants”) and abused by corrupt users as viral systems. Furthermore, the story included the death of Flynn and presented questions about the digital life of programs lasting beyond the mortality of their creators — the users.

My task was to compile great underground artists to create a new soundtrack for this darker world of Tron. After the completion of the initial tracklist and first production draft of the soundtrack, it seemed as if negotiations between Pixar and Disney had broken down. Funding for the project was eventually pulled.

I have been most excited to see the announcement of the third film, the new “TR2N” (Tron: Legacy), especially with the involvement of those who will be creating the new soundtrack. It is obvious to me that “Tron: Legacy” takes place after “The Rise Of The Virals” without abandoning its first concept. Perhaps that is why we’ve seen sites like Flynn Lives creep up in anticipation of the new film.

I’ve decided to release the preliminary version of the soundtrack which includes a special remix of Journey’s “Any Way You Want It” produced specifically for “Rise Of The Virals”. Journey provided two songs to the original “Tron”, and their song “Separate Ways” will reportedly be on the “Legacy” soundtrack as well. In any case, since the story of “Rise Of The Virals” takes place between the first “Tron” film and the upcoming “Tron 2: Legacy”, I can’t think of a better title for this material other than “Tron 1.5″. I hope you enjoy the music these artists have put such great work into.

– Flynn 1.5

Tron 1.5: “Rise Of The Virals”
(Digitally Remastered)

1. “For The Love Of ENCOM” (4:16) (Team9)
2. “Askew” (5:08) (Solcofn)
3. “Build A Better Lightcycle” (3:24) (Tiger Mendoza)
4. “Rise Of The Virals” (3:37) (World Famous Audio Hacker)
5. “Any Way You Want It” (4:30) (Rhythm Scholar Syntax Error Remix)
6. “Electro City” (5:24) (Lilith The Kitten)
7. “March To Silicon Palace” (3:34) (Future Sound Of Tron)
8. “Lora’s Theme” (4:34) (Team9)
9. “Technojazz” (5:56) (Solcofn)
10. “Love Theme” (4:11) (Tiger Mendoza)
11. “Paranoid Space” (2:45) (Tiger Mendoza)
12. “T128.Flynn.FK@yf” (6:30) (EBNC)
13. “Core Dump” (6:01) (Lilith The Kitten)
14. “Means To An End” (8:00) (Solcofn)
15. “Theme From Tron 105″ (1:26) (Carl Walters)

The full album is available for free download at http://tron.fm/

My own President Obama is this week off making his pitch for why Chicago should host the Olympic Games. Correction. Oops. I need to read the news. Chicago was eliminated first. But look out – our friends at Antipop (slogan: “antipop music for a pop music”) are using a different tool in their arsenal: music.

Watch the video for some fun gear spotting, plus one vintage arcade cabinet. I could point out stuff I see, but that’d spoil the fun. Shout out in comments.

There’s definitely a commercial gloss on this, but it’s nicely executed, and felt so absurdly Olympic to me that I actually couldn’t help but smile listening. (In fairness, either Chicago or Madrid ought to be able to do better than New York did with 2012; I recall dignitaries in traffic while rowers paced the polluter waters of Flushing Meadows. Yipes.)

Here you go, probably the most commercial music we’ll ever run on CDM:

Makes me want to, like, train or something.

Updated: From comments, I like these alternative suggestions by safd in place of “anti” pop:

superpop, poppypop, hippop, popcore, purelypop, universapop

Popcore is something I need to work on. It was worth posting this for that word alone.

Background: “Antipop is the Antonio Escobar music production personal studio, one of the most awarded Spanish producer and composer.” [sic]

Update: Superpop or antipop, the song alone couldn’t melt the hearts of the Olympic Committee. Congrats to – Rio!

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.

Kotaku gives us a video interview, here, while Music4Games gives us a written one here.

Surely, someone out there has the time and the Moogs (or Buchlas, as I keep saying) to do this up right. Takers?

Giving all the credit to Ron Grainer seems a little unfair; while Grainer composed the melody, most of the features of the Doctor Who theme itself were in fact the work of gifted pioneer Delia Derbyshire. Whereas Howell could actually play parts live, Derbyshire had a much harder task: painstakingly piecing the sounds out of repeat passes of tape, with only the simplest test tone generators and processors to produce sounds. Ironically, I think there was a far greater gap in the way synthesizer sounds were produced between 1963 and 1980 than 1980 and 2007, even if Howell brags about a “very modern synthesizer” that can play “8 notes at a time.” It’s cheaper now, but programming most synth patches hasn’t changed in the least. In fact, the CS-80 had more accessible hardware for programming, and never had to contend with OS X updates. Out of tune slightly? Erm, yes … but that’s cool, right? (Better add that to your software emulation. I’ll make no argument for superiority of value or weight. And I’ll make myself feel better by routing through some digital effects.)

See my two year-old roundup, though many of the sound links are now broken:
Doctor Who Theme: Behind the Scenes, Hear the Themes

The latest installment in the famed Tomb Raider series has done very well under its new developer, Crystal Dynamics. Tomb Raider: Legend debuted at No. 1 on the UK sales charts and has sold nearly 3 million units since release. Composer Troels Brun Folmann, Ph. D. scholar in Adaptive Game Audio from IT-Universitetet i København, was recently awarded a BAFTA award for Best Original Score for Tomb Raider: Legend. We had the opportunity to talk with him about composing for games, adaptive music, and more.

Create Digital Music: Troels, first of all, congratulations on your recent BAFTA award for your Tomb Raider: Legend score!

Troels Brun Folmann: Thanks. I’m still having problems sleeping!

CDM: So this is something I struggle with on a daily basis (with my own surname) — can you tell us how to correctly pronounce your name?

TBF: Haha! I don’t know to be honest. When I order something at Starbucks, they always ask for my name twice. First I go, “Troels.” Then they go, “Charles?” Then I go, “Ehm…Troels.” and get a cup of coffee named “Charles”. The solution was to change my name to “Troy”, so I use that all the time now at Starbucks. But the most common English pronunciation is “Trolls”.

CDM: Tell us a little bit about your background, for those who may not have read your blog, etc.

TBF: The majority of composers always have these cool stories about how they played at the age of 2 and so forth. Unfortunately my story is a little less sexy. I couldn’t speak before I reached the age of 6 and I was generally regarded as a loss for humanity. Nobody in my family played music except of my grand-dad, who was a terrible hobby musician. When I was about 10 years old I decided to follow his majestic path. I eventually became a Ph.D. Scholar in Dynamic/Adaptive music for games and tried building bridges between the academic world and the games industry. But enough about me, please. You can find my narcissistic weblog at www.deffmute.com if anybody should care to drop me a line.

CDM: Adaptive music for games is a fairly new concept, what made you decide to pursue that field for your Ph. D. work?

TBF: Good question. I would not say that adaptive music is a new concept, but the problem is that it’s never really been working. One of the main limitations is the fact that current generation of consoles like the PS2 and Xbox have very little RAM allocated for audio. Typically, sound designers have a mighty 2MB to play around with. True adaptive music needs be generated in real-time, and even the next-generation consoles like Xbox 360 and PS3 will not have resources enough to do this on a larger scale.

However, there are ways to work around the limitations. This usually involves the creation of custom technologies. I invented a methodology known as “micro-scoring”. It’s basically the idea of chopping your score down to very small components and triggering them in a way that compliments the game experience.

CDM: For those who may be considering such an academic pursuit, do you feel that your post-graduate studies have helped you as a working composer?

TBF: This is a very difficult question. Did academia help me become a better composer? No. Did academia help me get a better understanding of communication, clients and business? Absolutely. I would advise aspiring composers and musicians to pursue conservatory degrees or just experiment on their own, since classic academia is far away from the game business. However, I would advise all professional composers to take communication, client relationships, networking, promotion, sales and business seriously. You may be the greatest composer in the world, however you need more than your music to get by, in my opinion. A talent is a person that excels under a given set of circumstances. Professional music composition is bread and butter. Communication is key.

Anyway, let’s get back to your question regarding academia. I do think there is a potential in academia to support this, but the current research on interactive music is highly sparse and I had a hard time finding serious research material to support scientifically valid statements, while I was a scholar.

CDM: Let’s talk a little more in detail about Tomb Raider: Legend. First off, this was the first TR title for Crystal Dynamics, but you had been working with them for some time. Can you tell us how you came to work with them, and how you eventually came to be the composer for TRL?

TBF: Tomb Raider has sold over 30 million units through its 10 year lifespan. Crystal Dynamics has a long history in action-adventure games and Tomb Raider: Legend was a unique opportunity for the studio to embrace the brand and renew it at the same time. I originally came to Crystal Dynamics as a Ph.D. scholar, while conducting field studies into the game business. I have always had a very pragmatic approach to things, since I don’t believe in dry and boring academia. I had previously worked with Crystal on their award-winning FPS “Project: Snowblind” and we had a very inspiring collaboration. Crystal Dynamics invited me over to conduct field studies and invent new methodologies for interactive scoring in Tomb Raider: Legend. The collaboration grew and I had an extremely high ambition for the score. My ambition was to do a consecutive, non-repetitive score for the game, while ensuring “Hollywood-quality” music at the same time. Game music has a nasty tendency to become repetitious and loop-like in its nature, so I invented the “micro-scoring” methodology to avoid this.

Micro-scoring is essentially about breaking the score into a variety of small components that are assembled in real-time according to player action and/or interaction. I scored over 4 hours of orchestral/electronic music for the game and it took me about 8 months to finalize the whole project. All the music was scored on my 9 PC renderfarm (which comprises approximately 20GHz of CPU, 20GB GB, and 10TB of storage).

CDM: TRL is obviously a very different project from Project: Snowblind, with an installed fan-base, a legacy of games and films – what was your initial approach for keeping true to the history Tomb Raider, while imparting your own distinct qualities?

TBF: It’s very delicate work, handling a highly known brand such as Tomb Raider; everyone has different expectations. The role of a commercial composer is to unify the expectations and channel them into something that will please most of the involved parties. It is my job to understand the needs of the client/publisher, the in-house team and producers, marketing and sales, fans and gamers – and compile all these expectations into the score. I am a commercial artist doing commercial art, which means that I have to embrace and innovate conventions and stereotypes. I know many artists that follow their heart and gut feeling, which I highly respect. But dealing with mass consumer scoring is about professionalism and scoring for the masses. I call it: ” embracing the cliche”, which is easier said then done.

CDM: In other interviews and articles, you’ve touched upon the music system for TRL. Can you tell us how the adaptive music system for TRL differs from other music systems?

TBF: Allow me to go into detail on micro-scoring. One of the ways that games differ from motion pictures is in the interactive nature of the media and the fact we can never fully predict player behavior. The micro-scores are made in such a way that they adapt to player action or interaction. You have to imagine that there are thousands of things going on in the game environment — the idea behind micro-scoring is to support the major elements in the environment. An example can be a 5-second score for breaking pillars or rolling stones. While motion picture scoring would typically have a musical element to support such an action, it would normally be dismissed in the game world.

However, micro-scores allow us to support that action. For Tomb Raider: Legend, we spent a long time creating a highly advanced proprietary streaming system that allows us to trigger micro-scores all over the game world. So, essentially, I can place scores for any change in the game, which is naturally a complex and time consuming process. The trend of games – particularly next-generation 360 and PS3 – is one of complexity. Everything is getting more detailed, whether its multiple translucent layers of textures, real-time generated light and shadow maps, massive streaming game worlds and so forth. Audio and music is no exception. The need for dissecting music into smaller fractions is becoming increasingly important in order to support the decisions and experiences of the player.

However, there is one component more important than any of the technical features, and that is one of emotion. I personally believe music is the emotional glue between the player and the game. Now the second question would be, “How often do we become emotional by playing games (aside from slamming our mouse or controller after being fragged)?” I believe the answer to this question describes how much we still have to face as composers in interactive media.

CDM: We are hearing more and more adaptive soundtracks in current and next-generation titles. Being able to stream multiple music stems at will based on any number of variables – player interaction, geometry, scripted events, etc. – not only changes the way we experience the game from a purely musical perspective, but can also draw the player into the action more, providing a more cinematic, and possibly emotional, feel to the experience. With that in mind, how has working with adaptive systems affected your composing methods? Put another way, how has working with an adaptive music system altered your composing style as opposed to composing for linear media (such as film)?

TBF: The ability to understand game technologies and mechanics is becoming increasingly important for the composer. The amount of complexity and micro-scoring will increase in order to ensure a smooth and complimentary game experience. There is no doubt that adaptive mechanisms do change the way I compose and approach scoring.

Let me provide you a little insight into some of complexities we faced on Tomb Raider: Legend. First of all any game level is made of smaller “units”. So whenever a player moves around in the level, she/he will cross multiple units and unit boundaries. Whenever this happened, I placed a score, so you have to imagine a variety of subsequent scores for each level in the game. We basically used our streaming engine to support this and a variety of cross fade and mixing techniques to have seamless transitions the score.

However, we also placed a variety of small micro-scores that support scripted events, cinematics and so forth. All these elements mean you have to keep a consistent approach to your scoring. You have to ensure music is in similar keys, so the score transitions don’t stand out. You have to ensure that rhythmic transitions are smooth, which can be really difficult with different measures and BPM. I sometimes had to create micro-scores that worked as transitions, so essentially scoring a bridge between the different scores. The hardest thing is to ensure that all this can work at anytime in the game. You never know when the player decides to do something, move forward or backward in the game. The score needs to follow every possible action, which is quite complicated.

CDM: As you compose more music for games, have you found any tools that are particularly useful or valuable?

TBF: One of the most important things to me is instant access to my music, which is why I had to custom build a 9-PC renderfarm for my composition. Orchestration is particularly demanding and I never liked bouncing much. The way I built my render farm is pretty simple actually. I have 2 PCs for strings, 2 PCs for brass, 1 PC for woodwinds, 1 PC for percussion, 1 PC for choirs, 1 PC for ethnic instruments and my main computer. I use a variety of commercial and custom sample libraries. My favorite orchestral library is East West Quantum Leap Symphonic Library (particularly the XP edition). The guys also released an amazing choir library, which allows you to type in any text and have the choir sing it. (Ed: See our episodic review of EWQL Symphonic Choirs.) They also have a fantastic percussion library called Stormdrum and soon coming out with Stormdrum 2, which is going to be even wilder. I also enjoy many of the open-source VST instruments and effects, but my main source for basic effects is my trustworthy UAD.

I am gradually moving more and more into custom recordings and sample design. I bought a variety of ethnic instruments from ethnic instrument online-store, Lark in the Morning, and used them all over the Tomb Raider score. I like musical sound effects a lot and these are hard to come by in the commercial library world. I bought anything from the Armenian Duduk to the Japanese Shakuhachi – from Bolivian Pan flutes to African Whale drums. My audio engineer bought a saw and I would highly recommend you … not do the same! We have also done custom sample recordings of two orchestras, which is something I would advise all professional composers to do at some point. The amount and quality of the content is absolutely amazing and allows you to shape your templates in a much more advanced and personal way.

CDM: Can you tell us a little bit about your ‘typical’ approach to composing a piece of music for a game? I realize your process may differ based any number of factors, but maybe you have one or two methods that you normally start out with?

TBF: It depends on what type of music I’m composing. When I orchestrate I normally flesh out the whole score as a piano composition. I used to have a more impressionistic approach and compose on the fly; however, I realized I got more consistent results when I sketched in advance. As far as tips and tricks, there are a few things I rely on when composing. First of all, I never use quantization on orchestration. A real orchestra never plays completely synchronously and this is an important element to keep in mind. It’s basically about invoking life into your composition and your samples. Sometimes I try to think as the conductor. Whether it is a slight change in tempi or trying to create more dynamic movements with crossfades and volume adjustments. Another trick is to apply individual reverbs to different orchestral sections. Strings, Brass, Woods, Percussion and Choir react very differently to reverb, so applying individual convolution reverb to each section is quite beneficial. And make sure you have at least one convolution in the master output section as well. It’s really about recreating the beautiful, complex reflections you hear in a concert hall room and you can do this by combining multiple reverbs.

When I do electronica it’s different. I have no consistent methodology for electronica. It can be anything from laying down a nasty groove to routing an arpegiated synth through a glitch module. Anything from putting down a deep drone and placing a super reverbed female voice or tuning down my drums 24 semitones, distort them and see where it goes.

So long story short, I compose differently for each individual style of music.

CDM: Aside from the previous Tomb Raider scores, what other music influenced you during this particular project?

TBF: Oh dear … You ready? Hans Zimmer, Howard Shore, Pat Metheny, Thomas Newman, Gabriel Yared, David Arnold, Herbie Hancock, Boomjinx, BT, Jerry Goldsmith, Gorecki, Hans Gregory Williams, Don Davis, Danny Elfman, Alan Silvestri, John Williams, James Newton Howard, Edward Shearmur, St. Germain, ES Posthumus, Gustav Holst, Bill Brown, James Horner, John Barry, Trever Rabin, John Adams, Bernard Hermann, Alex North, Peter Gabriel, Sting, Sly and Robbie, Enya, Ennio Morricone, Thomas Bergersen and many, many others.

CDM: Anything new and exciting on the horizon for you?

TBF I am currently working on some unannounced projects, which are stretching my compositional palette further than ever. Imagine something between epic orchestral, glitch based electronica, large percussion ensembles and full symphonic choirs.

CDM: Thanks for spending time with us!”

TBF The pleasure has all been mine. If anybody wants to know more, feel free to contact me through my weblog at www.deffmute.com.

Contributing Editor W. Brent Latta is a game composer and sound designer working for Amaze Entertainment.

Much has already been written about Microsoft’s new console, the Xbox 360. We have a bevy of game reviews, accessories to buy, Live Arcade titles to play, and even future releases over which we drool. But not much has been written about the audio performance and capabilities of this first-of-the-next-generation contraptions. In this short review, I hope to give you a quick breakdown of the how the system has been working for me.

First off, let it be said that audio fidelity is, without question, top notch on this console. For the AAA titles I’ve played thus far, I have yet to cringe at a poorly downsampled audio segment, music that suffers from washy reverb tails due to poor compression algorithms, or any kind of clipping, distortion, or voice-allocation issues. The ability to fully utilize 5.1 surround is another big bonus. Games like Fight Night really sound fantastic and put you inside the action, with crowd noises coming at you from all sides. So from an audio specifications perspective, this system is without question the most sophisticated gaming console to date. (PC’s are not considered consoles, and thus I’m not including them in that statement.)

Now that is not to say that every game I’ve played sounds great. Indeed, the Tomb Raider demo I played had some poor choices in sound design. The sound of a rolling boulder was almost cartoon-like in its use of percussion (likely timpani or floor toms) to mimic the sound of rolling downhill. A shameful oversight in an otherwise great sounding game. I plan on checking out the full version of the game to see if the same samples are used, or if perhaps these were placeholders that somehow were never replaced in the demo.

As a media hub, I’ve only gone so far as to setup my Xbox for audio streaming. I have a PC in the other room which serves all of my audio files – over 6000 at present. I use it to stream music to my mobile device, and occasionally bring up an album or song at work using a cool application from Orb Networks. I’ve also installed the Media Connect app from Microsoft, which lets the Xbox ‘see’ all of those MP3s as well, turning my Xbox into a living-room jukebox, capable of accessing all of my music, creating custom playlists, and serving up some nice visuals if you’re hosting a party. The playback sounds great, and I haven’t run into any issues with connectivity on the Xbox side, though my PC’s wireless is a bit finicky. Mac users aren’t left out, either. Using a third party app called Connect 360 Mac-heads can stream their MP3 libraries to their 360′s as well.

Some of you may recall a story we ran last year regarding the controversial feature of custom-playlists-as-soundtracks to be included in the 360. We followed that story up with interviews with some influential figures in Game Audio. At the time, everyone was a little concerned at how the feature would actually be implemented, but the general consensus was that it wouldn’t negatively impact the need for a well-composed soundtrack for most titles.

Fortunately, this has turned out to be true, and I actually really like the way that Microsoft has implemented this feature. Because I have wireless access to my PC’s media library, I can choose to listen to any of my MP3s as the ‘soundtrack’ for the game I’m currently playing. I simply navigate to my Xbox Dashboard, select the album or artist I want to listen to, and press play. The music streams, replacing the in-game soundtrack without affecting the rest of the game audio. While the music clearly can’t ‘adapt’ to gameplay, it is nice to have the alternative to the pre-composed game score. No disrespect meant to the Soule brothers, but when you’re level grinding for hours on end in a game like Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, it is nice to hear some different music once in awhile.

I don’t think this feature is what The Fat Man had in mind when he suggested that games should ship with more music content. But the acceptable industry ratio of 40-hours of gamplay to roughly 1-hour of composed music is really a shame. I think most gamers and composers would be pleased with more…So this feature, while not exactly the same as having a few more hours of custom composed music, is a good alternative. And who knows? Perhaps some aspiring composers will even get the idea to compose their own soundtracks to popular games and offer them for download. That way players could just use these songs, rather than those that ship with the game…The possibilities are great and hopefully some budding entrepreneurs will find new ways of using this feature in conjunction with the Live Marketplace.

I’m only a few weeks in with my Xbox, but so far I’m very impressed with Microsoft’s choices, and I think they’ve done a lot of great things with this platform. Its capabilities offer great opportunities for gamers and game developers – including us audio geeks – as well.

I will be sure to report back as I get more playing time.

Ed: Others got Xboxes, you lucky bastards? Let us know your impressions of the system. -PK