It feels like hearing an ensemble of highly trained and sensitive performers who are completely devoted to your music, and who are improvising on it while the game is being played.
Bobby Tahouri
Composer, Rise of the Tomb Raider
Bobby Tahouri
Composer, Rise of the Tomb Raider
Along with a new concept comes a new set of tools for game composers and sound designers. The associated Designer Tool analyzes your original music using algorithms based on music theory, in order to learn its structure and style, so what you hear in the game is an extension of your own sound. You author and control your game’s sound; the system listens to you and follows your lead.
Procedural scoring opens up a world of new musical possibilities. Game music can change as quickly as needed to keep up with the most complex game action. Or let the system transition slowly between your musical states, without creating audio artifacts. Even control tempo in real-time.
The Dynamic Percussion System runs as a DSP unit in your audio engine (supported by fMod and WWise) with negligible CPU footprint. Instead of stacking up audio percussion tracks, the system only needs one channel. It stays synchronized with traditional looped audio in your audio engine. So you can record your other stems and loop them in your system while the percussion plays along procedurally.
The Designer Tool makes creating procedural music fit easily into your workflow. Write your percussion stems. Then input your MIDI and sample files into the Designer Tool, and they are converted into a dynamic composition algorithm that will be used in the game. From there, you can create variations––as many as you want––on your original composition, in order to musically evoke subtle and complex game states.
The Dynamic Percussion System supports our combat scenes better than any looping mix ever could. The results are amazing: it’s like having a composer scoring and conducting for your game in real-time! We have definitely hit a new benchmark in the expressiveness of game music with this system.
Philip Lamperski
Audio Designer, Crystal Dynamics