Hey guys,

So my first topic today is Interactive music, since that's whats going on atm. With Wwise I hope to branch out of just making music and sound effects for games and get more creatively involved with it. So, I started out with using my current projects music tracks for the basis of interactive music. This made a lot of sense as I was fabricating tracks to coincide with a theoretical sequel game, Panzer Dragoon Saga. So it had battle music, landscape music, town music and some events.

 I managed to have transitions going between landscape and battle and out again. With the entry cue in to the Battle being instant and a relatively sharp fade out of the background. The Battle for now fades back out to the landscape, until I whip up some victory and menu music. But, it syncs back at a random cue and not at the start. I wanted to do this for a few reasons.

• Battles could come very quickly and you would keep hearing the start of the track over and over again.
• It created a sense of time passing when you came out of battle.

I also had a similar way of thinking with the town music faded into from the landscapes. What I chose to do is having a long fade in, around a 5 second cross fade into a random cue (trying custom too). Now this, I don't think has been done very much in these RPG systems. I wanted you to to feel separate of this city, as if this town went on its own business without you. So it doesn't kick in when you enter. This basically goes back to, creating a sense of time passing.

So this structure took a few days to read up from scratch how to implement all this. But it has been incredibly fun, thinking of fun ways of interaction, with backing from some followers in twitter.

Still on Interactive music, but in a more directly involved way.

You might be familiar with Panzer Dragoon Saga, It is the basis of the music and of the structure of the hierarchy. It has a fantastic piece of coding animation for its time, when you choose your dragon stats. It is a circle with 4 points being attack, defence, magic and agility, you could move your cursor freely in the circle creating a mix up of the 4. Also the dragon changed form in real time to the cursor moving, amazing. The audio aspect was just a tone and it shifted pitches and filtered where you went.

There is a weird bleeping in the video though, ignore that.

I am now currently plotting to implement that with 4 music styles at each point with cross fades to the closest two of each track. I tried working Volume with 2 separate RTPC factors which didn't work, and shouldn't the way I wanted it too. Its all good and well though as I have a good solution, apart from the center of the circle. This is the area I'm unsure what to do there. Because the tracks fade away from the center, having them amalgamate in the center seems silly.

Having another track play in this area seems logical but having 2 RTPC factors control 1 parameter isn't going to work. Even then, it creates a "box" of influence rather than a circle as far as I'm aware.

To push forward, I made the 4 dragon form music tracks today, applying metaphorical thinking to their creation. The Attack is a harsh pushing forward tune, where as the Defence hangs back and dominates the lower end. The Magic has an offbeat tune to the rest and wisps up and down on its synth, then the Agility has some airiness to it and a constant flutter and popping beat to it.

The tracks where also all in 120BPM 10/4 timing for seamless looping, although will have to fire them in to see if natural decay isn't as smooth as it should be. I excluded a decay tail from the tracks, will just put one in to fix any problems. Also, I'm having trouble playing a post entry region only once on the battle themes intro. The solution it seems is to turn it into a transition so far, having it immediately play and then seamlessly transition to the battle theme.

So that's all for integration for today.

No prepared sketches to show what I'm doing and should probably do that next time. All I have is rough sketching from waking up in the middle of the night and having cracked a problem, haha. Nothing new on the prototype either, setting up a documents package for my lawyer and then, might be able to talk about it freely. I can say, that I'm pretty skint now though.

Little bit of audio theory, why do we like the sound of waves, rain, wind, general "hush" ing noises. I wrote a bit on this in my 3rd year dissertation and it still comes back into my mind. There is much debate on this topic and i believe in a multiple effects factor, including evolution of our ears. Seeing as its almost unconditional our liking to it, even before we know it. For example a mother "hush" in a child to sleep, why does the mother instinctively know that works? and of course, it doesn't always to be fair.

Serenity, freedom, tranquility, all words commonly associated with rain, the ocean and wind. It could all be, we were just very hot back 10s of thousands of years ago and really needed to cool down, dancing around for our baths. Or the simple fact that these are life giving sources.

Ill end today with a few links,

www.audiokinetic.com/en/resources/documents - a few downloads to learn your way about Wwise

geokda.co.uk - my site, where you will hear some of the music and eventually a video tutorial on how I implemented the audio into Wwise

Have a great day

SGW