Game Audio: Selected Student Works from Matt Ganucheau on Vimeo.

In the early days of game sound, musical soundtracks were all largely adaptive and interactive, fused with the sound effects of the game and the logic of gameplay. Scores were less Alfred Newman or John Williams, more Spike Jones. Today, game music has the potential to reinvent composition itself, to help us reimagine what makes a musical score as on-screen user action drives musical ideas. But with a few, notable exceptions, most modern titles have opted for big, Hollywood-style soundtracks – and the linear composition that goes with them, as though someone just took a film score CD and hit play.

It’s one thing to talk about that in theory. Better yet: give it a shot yourself. So why not teach game music as its own discipline?

Matt Ganucheau, a composer, sound designer, and interactive developer/artist, is teaching just that, working with students at Expression College in Emeryville, California. The accelerated course works with the elegant Unity game engine and a clone of the legendary Space Invaders arcade game, adding music built in Max/MSP. If Max seems an unlikely choice, its open source cousin Pure Data (Pd) is actually integrated with the game engine for Electronic Arts’ Spore, with music by Brian Eno working with EA’s Kent Jolly and contributor Aaron McLeran. So, this could be the wave of the future. The first problem: figuring out how to actually compose.

The results are astonishing, given that the students were just learning Max and had extremely limited amounts of time. I asked Matt to write up for CDM how the coursework evolved; he shares his process and what he learned as a teacher. We’re also working on open sourcing the coursework content and the patches, which we’ll soon provide both for Pd and Max/MSP. I’m doing some work on the game side so that you can play with game mechanics in Processing. Stay tuned for more on that.

We spoke a bit about this process – and interactive music in general – with Xeni Jardin and Boing Boing in their Game Developer Conference livecast a week ago Friday. Edited video of that coming soon.

Here’s Matt on the coursework itself:

The connection between music education and technology has always been really significant to me. Aside from (sometimes) being a teacher myself and having spent a few years doing training for notation package Sibelius, to me learning and teaching are fundamental to musical activity even outside schools.

I got to sit in as a guest on the excellent Music Tech for ME podcast last week:

Music Tech for ME 2008.07.01-#030

Be sure to check out the whole Music Tech for ME series. There’s some great stuff in there, covering educational issues, how technology is evolving and how it fits in with teaching, and broader musical and technological topics, as well:

musictechforme.com

Of course, on CDM we’re regularly pushing the envelope and getting as tech-specific as possible (hey, sometimes I actually lose myself). But it is important to realize that technological needs for teaching can be more modest — and as podcast host Keith Mason observed, music teachers are often way behind the technological curve, meaning starting with the basics is essential.

Another excellent resource for music technology educators:

mustech.net

It’s a blog network, and they’re trying to get 100 people blogging about music education. Your blog can be hosted wherever you like; they’re just collecting existing blogs.

Are you involved in music education? How do you work with technology? Are there specific issues you’d like to see covered on CDM? Let us know.

Photo: Oude School. (showing the traditional view of music education, though hey, putting in a portable digital recorder or adding computer notation could make all the difference)