Monday, May 22, 2006
Sunday, May 14, 2006
Algorithms & Music
What you need to create some sort of music engine and to create music for that engine, is to create a set of rules, something that will serve for the musician as well as the programmer.
Have in mind that a programmer with a good set of rules (what we call specification) will have an easy time coding your music into the game and it will work perfectly well from the beginning, but it you don’t give good rules the guess work on the programming side could ruin your musical results.
Programs follow what we call algorithms, in other words, a set of rules to solve a problem, check this out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm
Algorithms usually solve problems following a very easy logic path, which can be graphically displayed with flow charts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_charts
Examples of algorithms applied to music are here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_music
http://ccrma-www.stanford.edu/~blackrse/algorithm.html
Don’t think is something new; check this out from the ccrma page:
“Mozart, too, used automated composition techniques in his Musikalisches Wurfelspiel ("Dice Music"), a musical game which "involved assembling a number of small musical fragments, and combining them by chance, piecing together a new piece from randomly chosen parts" (Alpern, 1995). This very simple form of "algorithmic" composition leaves creative decisions in the hands of chance, letting the role of a dice to decide what notes are to be used.”
If you want to go even further:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_state_machine
Thursday, May 04, 2006
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Monday, April 10, 2006
More links for Music & Videogames
Some of them won't work as link you may need to copy/paste in your URL control.
THis one is specially interesting
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
More links, this time from the UCLA course, reproduced with permission here
| Audio Tools | Cubase SX/Nuendo/Wavelab Cubase SX3 and Nuendo 3 are Cross-platform Audio/MIDI creation software. Wavelab is an audio editing software. |
| Digital Performer Audio/MIDI creation software for the Mac | |
| Live Cross-platform Audio/MIDI creation software | |
| Logic Pro Audio/MIDI creation software for the Mac | |
| Pro Tools Cross-platform Audio/MIDI creation software | |
| Reason Cross-platform Audio/MIDI creation software | |
| SAWStudio PC audio editing software. Similar in function to Pro Tools. | |
| Sonar PC Audio/MIDI creation software | |
| Sound Forge PC audio editing software | |
| Composers | |
| Bill Brown | |
| Sascha Dikiciyan (aka Sonic Mayhem) | |
| Alex Kharlamov | |
| Billy Martin | |
| Lennie Moore | |
| Tommy Tallarico | |
| Cris Velasco | |
| Jack Wall | |
| Inon Zur | |
| Associations | |
| Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences (AIAS) | |
| American Composers Forum | |
| Gamasutra | |
| Game Audio Network Guild | |
| Game Developer Magazine | |
| Game Developers Conference (GDC) | |
| Game Music Radio | |
| International Game Developers Association | |
| Music 4 Games | |
| Society of Composers & Lyricists | |
| Sample Players | |
| Gigastudio GS3 Orchestra | |
| Halion | |
| Kontakt | |
| Logic EXS | |
| MachFive | |
| East West | |
| Gigastudio | |
| Ilio | |
| Sample libraries | |
| ProjectSAM | |
| Sonic Implants | |
| Spectrasonics | |
| VSL (Vienna Symphony Library) | |
| Softsynth | |
| Arturia | |
| East West | |
| Ilio | |
| Native Instruments | |
| Spectrasonics | |
| Steinberg |