Intro

Mega Man 3 was my first introduction to music. According to my family I would turn on the opening screen and just listen to the main menu music for five minutes before actually playing. In fact, when I went back to my favorite NES games, I found they all had great music. There was one level in particular in Little Nemo that I loved even though I found the rest of the game boring. Sure enough that level had the song that I can still hum from that game. In retrospect I realize that the games I remember the most had the best music.

Is this to say that I loved these video games for their music? I don't think so - good music enhances the experience and changes what would just be a good game into a fever inducing race against time. Both music and games, like many of the best experiences in life, follow a similar arc. To simplify a profound experience, things start slow and introduce you to the elements then get more and more complicated and build up until the final climatic moment. So good video game music can follow this arc and enhance the gameplay - during simple moments the music sits in the background and builds tension, during chaotic moments the music will become more intense and releases tension, in the simplest case. A great example of this is in Super Mario Galaxy, espcially during the boss battles with Bowser.
Skip to 1:30 in this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1zHLX7q8Mg&feature=related) and listen to how the music starts and dynamically changes depending on the action. The lead-up to about 3:20 is a good example of a smooth transition between the two versions of the same song. Super Mario Galaxy has very subtle changes of music throughout the whole game that back up the mood very well. The challenges of following the action is much more difficult than in movies since the action cannot be predicted. Super Mario Galaxy solves this problem by writing multiple versions of the same music for different "modes" the player might be in.

Another great example (though watching doesn't do it justice, it must be played) is Jonathan Mak's Everyday Shooter. Instead of explosions, shooting enemies produces musical events; notes, phrases or just atmospheric sounds. Thus, naturally the music becomes more intense as the fighting becomes more intense. When each level starts there aren't many enemies on screen, thus the music is simple, by the end when the whole screen is filled with enemies the music becomes a multi-layered complex mess which works perfectly.

So those themes are one-half of what this blog is about, this is the "Music Generation in Video Games". The other half is "Music Analysis in Video Games", and this focuses on the link between the video game experience and music listening experience but goes in the opposite direction. Instead of actions in game affecting events in the music, the events in the game follow events in the music. AudioSurf is a great, though far from perfect, recent example of how this could work. It attempts to analyze tempo and other features but fails at extracting most things from the song, but excels at extracting the intensity of the song and similar moments in the song. Intense moments are shown in game as a ship going down hill, while calmer moments are shown as going uphill. This works incredibly well because the games action follows the arc of intensity that is inherent in the best songs. The song in this video shows how this works well (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shZpeWWGh48). The moment of coming over the hill into an intense moment of the song can be really exhilerating while playing.