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One of the electives I'm taking at college is "Advanced Scoring for Video Games" which basically talks about interactivity in music, explores interactive audio middleware (I.e. FMOD and Wwise and a bit of xact)
The Wwise assignment basically requires you to take an existing game, re-score it, and include interactive elements. Many people chose games that already had interactivity in them, I.e. Mass Effect, God of War, that kind of stuff. (combat -> transitions to combat music, idle -> transitions to idle music, 'seamlessly') I've noticed two different trends in how video games are scored, mainly the eastern and western styles which really, really differ. While games made in the west typically score moods rather than themes, which makes it easier to do all that interactivity and transitioning, Japanese games typically compose themes, complex musical structures/progressions, very memorable melodies, etc which typically doesn't translate too well into interactivity - they just fire and forget. I decided to give myself a challenge and do a Sonic level and give it some form of interactivity.
Since, for better or worse, the game is on rails a lot, and levels are divided into segments, I thought I'd compose something that actually had a song structure, then basically just make sure that transitions from one section to the next were possible from a multitude of areas. Additionally, I intended to have 3 genres of the music, which hot-swapped depending on how well Sonic was doing. This is the result.
(Can't get annotiations to not bug out in embed, so open in a proper window if you really want to read all that shit)
It's funny though, SEGA/Sonic Team was implementing the exact same crossfading thing with Generations and it was kinda hilarious/confusing when I found out while playing the 2nd Generations demo and hearing the drums swap to double time when boosting. One thing I really, really, REALLY hate about the recent games is that the game engine basically destroys the music with a high pass filter just to get the 'lol sonic's going really fast' point across when boosting, which I think is a shame. I ranted about it in video annotations as well, but City Escape was so good because the music was loud. It started loud, and wouldn't have had the same impact if it suddenly just dropped right back off after coming in strong.
I'd have remade/remixed the original Rooftop Run music, except that part of the requirements is original music, so derp.
( The music itself, although 'original' has quite a lot of nods to Sonic music. There's a slap bass pattern from Station Square, a whole bunch of guitar riffs from all over the franchise (I outlined the most obvious one from SA1's Tails theme) and some drum fills are inspired by the Skydeck zone music. Oh, and the guitar solo's ending is obviously Sonic Drive (Sonic X JP OP) inspired. :P And the music titles "Be Cool, Be Wild" is an obvious nod to the track "Be Cool, Be Wild, Be Groovy" - Be Groovy was intended to be a 3rd genre, when Sonic went idle (very light breakbeat-type stuff, like Ocean Wave or Apotos) but it wasn't working out and I didn't have time to revisit it in time for assignment submission, so it just got axed.
Made some comparison clips here:
http://soundcloud.co...eos-lol/s-ZyiBW
The Wwise assignment basically requires you to take an existing game, re-score it, and include interactive elements. Many people chose games that already had interactivity in them, I.e. Mass Effect, God of War, that kind of stuff. (combat -> transitions to combat music, idle -> transitions to idle music, 'seamlessly') I've noticed two different trends in how video games are scored, mainly the eastern and western styles which really, really differ. While games made in the west typically score moods rather than themes, which makes it easier to do all that interactivity and transitioning, Japanese games typically compose themes, complex musical structures/progressions, very memorable melodies, etc which typically doesn't translate too well into interactivity - they just fire and forget. I decided to give myself a challenge and do a Sonic level and give it some form of interactivity.
Since, for better or worse, the game is on rails a lot, and levels are divided into segments, I thought I'd compose something that actually had a song structure, then basically just make sure that transitions from one section to the next were possible from a multitude of areas. Additionally, I intended to have 3 genres of the music, which hot-swapped depending on how well Sonic was doing. This is the result.
(Can't get annotiations to not bug out in embed, so open in a proper window if you really want to read all that shit)
It's funny though, SEGA/Sonic Team was implementing the exact same crossfading thing with Generations and it was kinda hilarious/confusing when I found out while playing the 2nd Generations demo and hearing the drums swap to double time when boosting. One thing I really, really, REALLY hate about the recent games is that the game engine basically destroys the music with a high pass filter just to get the 'lol sonic's going really fast' point across when boosting, which I think is a shame. I ranted about it in video annotations as well, but City Escape was so good because the music was loud. It started loud, and wouldn't have had the same impact if it suddenly just dropped right back off after coming in strong.
I'd have remade/remixed the original Rooftop Run music, except that part of the requirements is original music, so derp.
( The music itself, although 'original' has quite a lot of nods to Sonic music. There's a slap bass pattern from Station Square, a whole bunch of guitar riffs from all over the franchise (I outlined the most obvious one from SA1's Tails theme) and some drum fills are inspired by the Skydeck zone music. Oh, and the guitar solo's ending is obviously Sonic Drive (Sonic X JP OP) inspired. :P And the music titles "Be Cool, Be Wild" is an obvious nod to the track "Be Cool, Be Wild, Be Groovy" - Be Groovy was intended to be a 3rd genre, when Sonic went idle (very light breakbeat-type stuff, like Ocean Wave or Apotos) but it wasn't working out and I didn't have time to revisit it in time for assignment submission, so it just got axed.Made some comparison clips here:
http://soundcloud.co...eos-lol/s-ZyiBW
This post has been edited by Falk: 10 November 2011 - 06:09 AM
