Hacker News Reader

Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

To me the exciting thing about automatic music composition isn't royalty-free prerecorded music, but the potential for real-time composition. Imagine a video game where your actions instantly affect the music, not just by splicing together prerecorded clips but actually by having new music composed and performed in real time. Or, somewhat more fancifully, imagine a set of headphones that play a continuous soundtrack for your life based on what's happening around you.

Is Jukedeck looking into real-time composition?

View on HN

The original FarCry game had that.

A friend of mine did the music/soundscape and worked with the sound-engineers to create layer upon layers of discreet musical loops and sound effects which they then blended together in many different ways.

Something like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JAcswUJAFE

Yeah something like that.

We're not doing it right now, but rest assured that we find that fascinating too.

Are you guys planning to opensource the core library used to generate the music?

This is a much better path to follow, royalty-free music market is so limited, and I see interesting tech going to waste, if you want more market data on this, It is available.

Spore (2008) had a soundtrack that evolved based on your actions and your creature's evolution.

I didn't know that! Maybe that's why I can't recall how any of it sounds, short of a disconnected beep and boop here and there.

This was one of the draws of the Dreamcast / PS2 game Rez; your gameplay layered sound into the base music track.

One of my favourite games ever. Was recently announced with VR support: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xegBdz8K2nU

The old lucasarts games had aMuse for this kind of effect.

They did live mixing of the music in SSX Tricky. Here's a video with Mix Master Mike talking about it, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0RyEysTZwY

yeah, that's a really freaking good idea. One gets bored of hearing the same music over and over again in a video game... and having something plays to the right ambient mood (battle, wandering, etc) would be really cool.

Part of the appeal of FF7 is the soundtrack. Make that dynamic, and you would've ruined FF7.

It's a good idea that makes sense for a lot of games. Just pointing out a counterexample.

Dynamic doesn't necessarily mean "random". A game with dynamic music could still have a set of common themes. Good composers can blend themes together and make variations on a theme for any mood. There's no fundamental reason dynamic music couldn't be every bit as good, musically, as pre-composed music.

Proteus (video game) has procedural mixing of a pre-set score based on which objects the player is near at. I suppose not much in terms of actual composition (harmony etc), but something which continues to irk me (so to speak) to try to think whether more than that is feasibly doable presently (and not only in the future).

Has there been research into this? That's a really cool concept. It's something I'd like to look into, if anyone knows any references.

I heard an interesting talk by someone who explored real-time game soundtrack composition for his dissertation: http://www.danielbrownmusic.com/artificial-musical-intellige...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com