On behalf of the Utrecht School of the Arts – School of Music & Technology I visited the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2012 audio tracks. For colleagues and peers, I’ve made an overview that can be found below.
book about music games
Today I learned about the existence of a book dedicated to music games – Music Games Rock – by Scott Steinberg. Read this teaser:
Chronicling the meteoric rise and fall (and rise again) of music video games, Music Games Rock: Rhythm Gaming’s Greatest Hits of All Time is the first book to explore the field’s history, origins and most spectacular hits and flops. Offering an inside look at rhythm gaming’s hottest headliners and oddest one-hit wonders – including exclusive tour stories from the creators of Guitar Hero and Rock Band – it’s your backstage pass behind the scenes of the games industry’s hottest act.
It seems to be a great overview of the music games that have been published so far. And you know what? It can be downloaded for free here!
[thanks, Jaap! 
]
This is the game I’ve been working on after becoming a Doctor! It’s Gluddle by Creative Heroes (Richard van Tol and yours truly) and it’s absurdistic and we’ve done some things differently with audio.
More on Gluddle.com
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Guitar Heroes - by SNDR
In the design research investigation Listen! the multi-disciplinary collaboration between game design and audio design students is researched. The research focuses on gathering more insight in the creative design process of game audio and presents general recommendations and pitfalls for the development of game audio.
Richard and I have added the IEZA framework for game audio on Wikipedia. This way everyone who uses IEZA can contribute to the further development of this framework and add his or her insights.
IEZA framework can be used to conceptualise the communication by means of game audio
The URL is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEZA_Framework
The Dutch Control Magazine has published 6 interesting items on game music. The articles have also been published on the Control Magazine website. The articles have been written in Dutch, but perhaps Google Translate can help you understand the articles. For your convenience, there’s a [T] after the links leading you to an English translation.
The game studio FluffyLogic invites you to create some original music for their new social game Ur Zoo.
The lucky winner’s music will feature in the game and their name will appear in the game credits!
See: http://www.fluffylogic.net/2011/07/ur-zoo-social-game-music-competition/
Pointer to a symposium in the Netherlands:
VIDEOGAME MUSIC: PLAY, FANS, SPACE
13 September 2011
Utrecht University, NL
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For your information: a lecture in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
28 July the music of Iron Grip, the game by Tim van Geel, componist and designer ISOTX.
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/tim-van-geel/10/5b0/890
15:30, Dutch Game Garden, Neude 5, Utrecht
Sign up: martine [AT] dutchgamegarden.nl
At the Utrecht School of the Arts, the adaptive music systems research group investigates the design of music for non-linear contexts. Post-graduates that conducted research in this group have formed a company – GreenCouch – and recently they’ve sent me an example movie of one of their projects.
The example movie contains an explanation of the music system used in the Xbox-game Shortburst. It’s pretty self explanatory and shows the flexible system in real-time.
The description of the video:
“cell-based music”, or “horizontal resequencing” in a browser-based, simple, nln-player, with the music for the Xbox-game Shortburst.
The web-version of the nln-player was built with the Schillmania Soundmanager 2 library, php and javascript. The idea was to shift the focus from organising the musical material with, often complex, data-structures, to a very simple model in which the limitations for the composer were greater, but the administrative work and the needed understanding of (meta-)data was much less.
This same framework was used for the implementation of the interactive music in XNA5 for an Xbox game, Shortburst.
More information on www.greencouch.nl and www.nln-player.com
