The theme of this year’s CTM Festival was "Overlap, Sound and Other Media." While the opening concert with Jacob Kirkegaard, Transforma, and Hiroaki Umeda gave rich examples of sound overlapping with other performing media, the festival’s conference series explored many other connections. Perhaps the most powerful of these was the series of events that formed a kind of mini conference called "A Maze. Interact… Celebrating the Convergence of Games, Art, and Music." As part of this, there was a symposium, workshops, exhibits, a night of chip music, and something called the Global Game Jam.
The keynote for the symposium was delivered by Japanese game developer Keiichi Yano, founder of the company iNiS. The company develops rhythm-based games in which the player must develop a kind of musical interaction with the game. His address dealt with a couple of practical issues from a developer’s point of view. First, he pointed out that advances in gaming really were dependent on hardware innovation, and the creativity involved in game design really comes from exploring the potential each new platform offers. While early gaming systems may have had limited resources, especially for audio, the games that were successful found clever ways to use these, especially the game controllers themselves. The second point Yano talked about was culture. To be successful, a developer needs to understand the culture of the intended audience. Some of the games developed by iNiS, such as their popular Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, are intended for release only in Japan, and some of the game trailers Yano showed clearly brought this point across.
Keiichi Yano
While Yano’s opening remarks where general observations, the next speaker, Leonard J, Paul, went directly into some of the concrete issues in game music and sound design. In his talk "Droppin’ Science – Adaptive Music Design," Paul spoke of the idea of adaptive music design as a way to construct musical ideas and transitions that can be called on in response to choices made in gameplay. The "Adaptive Music Matrix" shown in the table below shows a way to organize the design of transitions between two sets of five options. In this example, there are five scenes at a given point in a game when the player could make a move that would trigger a transition to one of five other scenes. Each scene has a distinct musical theme, but abruptly ending one and going directly to the next results in a soundtrack that would disrupt the flow of the game. The solution is a musical transition that would lead one section into another. In a typical song, there is some musical idea that sets up a move to the next section, verse to chorus, let’s say. At any point in a game there could be an action that triggers a change in music. Let’s say a player is in scene 2 and triggers an action that goes to scene 5. According to the matrix, transition 8 would be called to get from one to the next. Paul maintains the Video Game AudioWebsite which has a wealth of information he has assembled.
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The Adaptive Music Matrix. Bold indicates scenes, numbers are for transitions.
The next two presentations examined game music as an extension of electronic music in general. In his talk, Michael Harenberg made connections between game music, especially early game music, and early electroacoustic music, citing examples from Louis and Bebe Barron’s score for the 1956 film Forbidden Planet as well as Tron, the 1982 film with a score by Wendy Carlos. He also points out that game music is the first popular musical form to arise directly from digital media.
Leonard J. Paul
Julian Oliver followed with "Computer Games as Musical Instruments," discussing how game-player interaction can be seen as a form of musical expression. He made the connection with the following statement: "Playing any game can be read as the joy of working with and within the confines of a unique and defined system." That just about sums up what can be said about interactive computer music. I would maintain that developing interactive electronic performance skills is good way to develop a knack for developing game sound strategies. This kind of convergence was really what all the CTM conference sessions were about.
A Maze Interact was far more than talk. There was an exhibition of seventeen key electronic music-based games running on their original platforms, starting from Moondust for PC from 1983 all the way to last year’s DJ Hero. These showed how far the development of game sound has come over the years, and in some cases, how one game influenced another. For example, the technology developed by Harmonix for their 2001 game FreQuency provided the basis for the gameplay design in Guitar Hero and later for Rock Band.
CTM also hosted Berlin’s contribution to the Global Game Jam. The idea here was for teams to develop a game in 48 hours. This was indeed a global event with 120 locations participating, and in the end, we saw what a little creativity and lots of caffeine could produce. Nothing here was going to take a bite out of Guitar Hero’s market share, but this event was more about fostering a sense of community, bringing many diverse talents together to share ideas.