Screenshot of Biophilia

If you’re into adaptive/interactive music, you should definitely check out the Biophilia app by Björk. This ‘full-length app-album’ is an interesting application in which studio-produced music, music apps and visual art meet.

Today is the official release of the alpha version with all the music tracks that can be bought from the free main (mother) app. The beta was published earlier this year.
[Björk website]
[iTunes link]

Click to hear Richard Dreyfuss.

Footsteps Retro Sound Study from lost lab on Vimeo.

Visit: http://blog.lostchocolatelab.com/2010/03/footsteps-informal-game-sound-study.html

Extant - Zombie Audio Game

We released a tech demo for Extant in October 2010, a few days prior to Halloween. The demo allows players to wander freely through an atmospheric, monster-infested world, exploring sites and buildings while fighting off zombies and collecting pickups such as ammo and medicine.

Extant is based on concepts developed back in 2002 for an audio game prototype named “Dark – A Garden Wander”, created by Sander Huiberts, Richard van Tol and Hugo Verweij. One example of such a concept is Moby, the protagonists dog, who can guide the player to certain areas and objects using an innovative command menu.

Through this tech demo we explore the design possibilities of an audio-only game space that is intuitive, immersive and easy to navigate. We found that a space based on spheres meets such requirements best. For example, players wander around on a spherical-shaped world, in a fashion similar to Mario on a small planet in Super Mario Galaxy. This approach frees designers from having to add spatial obstructions in order to constrain the players’ free movement to a specific area. Spatial obstructions can be quite a design challenge in audio games, since walls are usually silent and one does not want the player to constantly bump into them. Each building and site is circular as well, allowing the player to enter from any direction.

The Extant tech demo can be download for free at the Creative Heroes website.

Discuss Extant at the AudioGames Forum.

• Audacity: free audio editor
• 25 Free Digital Audio Editors You Should Know: list of free audio editors
• The Freesound Project: The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, … mostly CC-by license
• OPsound – “free love, free music” (ahum)
• FreePlayMusic
• Free sound links
• Looperman: cool loops
• Loopasonic: free loops
• Rebirth (free classic “drum computer”)
• Radio Daddy (voice over community voor radio voices, place a request for leaders, one-liners, etc)
• Findsounds.com slightly out-dated database with sound files
• http://digifx.hku.nl/ [Only for HKU-students, access limited to KMT network in Hilversum]
• Sound design guide: how to make specific sounds ?
• FMOD MP3 licensing issues: All about using MP3 in games.
• …more to be added soon…

[via Richard]

Last week, Creative Heroes released the Helmut Scream, which can be used freely. You’re invited to download and use Wilhelm’s jealous brother in your projects.

By the way, it was a great venue, featuring a truly wonderful performance installation by Matthias Oostrik. See the two pictures below I made before the summit started:

Festival of Games in Ottone

Festival of Games in Ottone

[Download the Slides as PDF]
More information and weblinks at FoG.AudioGames.net

See a slideshow below the break.

Game Audio Lab: an educational framework for research and design of realtime, nonlinear sound and music design. Photo © Sander Huiberts

The Music Design Group of the Utrecht School of the Arts under Jan IJzermans in the Netherlands has developed a lab for academic purposes which enables research and rapid prototyping of nonlinear audio. The system offers designers the ability to construct composite variables based on variables that are available in the original game system. In this paper, the architecture of the hardware and software as well as the motivation for this setup are discussed.

Nonlinear and adaptive systems for sound and music in games are gaining popularity due to their potential to enhance the game experience. The framework enables academics to map composite variables and adapt sound and music design in real-time during active game play. Composite variables were found to be more useful than mapping simple game parameters directly to the sound design. To give an example: mapping the state of an adaptive environment to the health level of the avatar often is too obvious for the player.

The paper also discusses the need for open game systems, which help designers to study sound design in realtime settings. Most game platforms are closed and protected by intellectual property. Interestingly, many academics mentioned this during the conference.

Unfortunately, I can’t publish the article here, so if you are interested it’s probably best to visit the AES website. The reference to the article is:

Huiberts, S. Van Tol, R and Went, K. (2009) GAME AUDIO LAB – AN ARCHITECTURAL FRAMEWORK FOR NONLINEAR AUDIO IN GAMES. In: Kelly, M. Proceedings AES 35th International Conference Audio for Games, 2009. Royal Academy of Engineering, London, UK.

Kees presenting at the AES. Photo: Sander Huiberts

Some video demos of applications (Half-Life 2 Source engine, OSC, Bridge software, FMOD and GStoolkit in Max/MSP) are listed below:

Credits for the game lab and these applications go to Arjen Schut, Mark Doeze, Maurice Alberts, Ramon Kerstens and Rogier Habraken. They truly did a wonderful job in this project.

Full demonstration Game Audio Lab Half Life 2: actual game play (select watch in high quality):

Simple demonstration: gunsound impact changes:

Simple demonstration: atmosphere dynamically changes with health status:

[For more information and the slides of this presentation, head over to adaptivemusicsystems.hku.nl]