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June 15, 2005
Adaptive Audio in games
Interesting piece on “adaptive audio” in games at Pitchfork, of all places. Ignore the dumb rhetorical device in the title, John Cage’s XBox is quite a good discussion of how this kind of audio is a lot like other adaptive design:
Adaptive audio doesn’t have to be subtle; the score can narrate the action, say, by changing to an anthem or a dirge as you win or lose a fight. … “I would actually record [all of the orchestrations] in sections. Because everything is recorded to a click track, everything can be kept in sync. So I would record for instance just the string section doing the tune in maybe four or five different passes, but each pass would be a slightly different nuance of the music, so maybe with a slightly evil undertone, or maybe less dramatic or maybe with a sadness to it…Then I’d make sure that any section could go with any section. When you start to sync these things up, your choices are virtually limitless.”
Posted by Andrew at June 15, 2005 04:47 PM