[kjander79]

The iMuse system really is remarkable. Games like X-Wing took great advantage of the features, when a Star Destroyer jumps into the game the music would seamlessly transition to the imperial March and it felt just like being in the movies. I don't think any modern system even tries to do those seamless transitions from one music piece to another.

One thing I wonder about .. he mentions CD-audio (Redbook?) as being one capability of the system. But the CD-Audio games like X-Wing vs Tie Fighter were much more limited in that sense. You'd literally just hear the music switch to the new track. And the Force Unleashed, the last game that used iMuse, wasn't particularly remarkable if memory serves. I wonder if that was a limitation they just couldn't quite make as seamless?

I figure today you could do it, with a "virtual MIDI" system using MP3 audio of individual instrument sounds ..

Edited to add: that last sentence is essential what a DAW provides.

[sirtaj]

Also done very well in Monkey Island 2 with iMuse as well, in which a lot of care was taken in transitioning music with custom bridges. It was quite subtle and lovely, and is considered a high point in video game music.

1. A video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7N41TEcjcvM

2. Some details: https://mixnmojo.com/features/sitefeatures/LucasArts-Secret-...

[gmueckl]

Games today feature dynamic music with loops and transitions and individual stems that can be remixed at runtime. One prominent example (to me, at least) is "Take Control" playing over the Ashtray Maze in Control. This sounds like an absolutely seamless prog metal song while playing, but it is actually highly reactive to the gameplay - the rapid-fire sequence of battle arenas and fast paced corridors. The player stays in absolute control of the pacing the whole time.

[izacus]

Similar with Herald of Darkness in Alan Wake 2 "We Sing" level, the song loops through bridges based on how long you take to play through it.

And that's only the most obvious examples - games like Deus Ex and others have featured dynamic music transitions decades ago.

[joloooo]

Tetris Effect is also a great example of this. Each movement and rotation of pieces impacts the score and each level has varied genres. One of my favorites is the New York City Jazz level.

[zerocrates]

Hi-Fi Rush did some of the opposite: the gameplay in certain parts shrinks or stretches so it takes the right amount of time to hit the next musical cue.

[cgio]

Ashtray Maze is a masterpiece and music is core to its experience indeed.

[whywhywhywhy]

Nier Automata comes to mind of an example, has many versions (musically and lyrically) of the same pieces for each area and transitions between them.

[imp0cat]

Much like the Need for Speed series (I believe it was introduced in 1998, in the third installment called Hot Pursuit).

[redwall_hp]

Final Fantasy XIV does this a lot. Boss fights' music will often change depending on what phase of the fight you're in, and in some the music will gradually transition to the heroic themes at the right moment.

[meshula]

Take Control is amazing.

[phire]

> I wonder if that was a limitation they just couldn't quite make as seamless?

It's a fundamental limitation of CD audio. There isn't enough buffering to keep playing sound while the laser seeks to the next track, so there must be a gap. The gap isn't even predictable, the seek time will vary from drive to drive and even vary on the same drive.

With CD audio, your CD-ROM drive actually switches mode to become a regular CD player. The digital samples don't get sent to your sound card, the drive actually has all the electronics required to decode the digital audio and convert it to analog. All your sound card does is mix the analog output from your CD ROM drive with everything else.

The game can only really send "skip to track" style commands to the drive, more or less the same set of commands you could send with a proper CD player's remote.

[crq-yml]

CD and other formats create trade-offs vs MIDI event sequences - it's a simple playback method offering a lot of fidelity but in exchange, you're tied to having either "one track at a time and the CD spins up in between" (Redbook CD), cueing uncompressed sampled tracks(feasible but memory intensive) or cueing one or more lossy-compressed streams(which added performance or hardware-specific considerations at the time, and in many formats, also limits your ability to seek to a particular point during playback or do fine-grained alterations with DSP). So as a dynamic music system it tends to lend itself to brief "stings" like the Half-Life 1 soundtrack, or simple explore/combat loops that crossfade or overlay on each other. Tempo and key changes have been off the table, at least up until recently(and even then, it really impacts sound quality). DJ software offers the best examples of what can be done when combining prerecorded material live and there are some characteristic things about how DJs perform transitions and mashups which are musically compelling but won't work everywhere for all material.

MIDI isn't really that much better, though - it's a compatibility-centric protocol, so it doesn't get at the heart of the issue with dynamic audio of "how do I coordinate this". All it is responsible for is an abstract "channel, patch number, event" system, leaving the details involved in coordinating multiple MIDI sequences and triggering appropriate sounds to be worked out in implementation. An implementation that does everything a DAW does with MIDI sequences has to also implement all the DSP effects and configuration surfaces, which is out of scope for most projects, although FMOD does enable something close to that.

I think the best approach for exploring dynamic and interactive right now is really to make use of systems that allow for live coding - Pure Data, Supercollider, etc. These untangle the principal assumptions of "either audio tracks or event sequences" and allow choice, making it more straightforward to coordinate everything centrally, do some synthesis or processing, some sequencing, adopt novel methods of notation. The downside is that these are big runtimes with a lot of deployment footprint, so they aren't something that people just drop into game engines.

[Sharlin]

> I figure today you could do it, with a "virtual MIDI" system using MP3 audio of individual instrument sounds ..

Reinventing tracker music, in other words? =D

[meshula]

X-Wing vs Tie Fighter: available memory and CD seek performance really restricted what you could do then.

The Force Unleashed: this is one of those "succeeds if it's invisible" things. The music is procedural based on mixing rhythmic and arrhythmic stems. That allowed continuous cross fades without needing to precisely match beats. That was a limitation again of not being able to precisely line up stems. The other fun thing that was introduced was physics driven synthesis. The DMM system fed information about strain, impacts, and other events into a granular synthesizer. The bussing and ducking architecture was derived from this paper by Walter Murch: https://transom.org/wp-content/uploads/2005/04/200504.review... Fun anecdote: I was at a party with some audio nerds, and raving about the paper to a new acquaintance, who interrupted me and said, "Oh, I wrote that!"

[btown]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MguVQ1Fja8&t=8 - an example of the X-Wing iMUSE soundtrack! You can hear it swap in memorable tags, literally without missing a beat.

From a musical theater composition perspective, it's almost like building around vamp sections: https://romanbenedict.com/vamp-safety-repeat/ - you build a neutral, repeatable motif that you can easily lay under unpredictably timed segments (e.g. spoken dialogue), that's primed to "explode" into a memorable melody whenever the on-stage timing calls for it!

[modeless]

X-Wing just had great music. Even the original stuff was great. The music for the training run was perfect.

Modern games have similar reactive music systems but I've never heard one I felt was better than X-Wing's. They got it right on the first try.

[xyzzy_plugh]

What made these games different was that the musical themes were significant and well known long before you installed your SoundBlaster. The music was mixed at high intensity out of the box allowing it to influence you, each track tailored to the moment.

This gave the series a leg up in that the music could actually communicate information effectively -- a tense moment, the shifting tide of the battle, the calm after a victory -- whereas other games simply had to put up waveforms that sounded pleasing.

To be fair many games experimented with sound design in this era, but few had such legendary IP to build with. An unfair advantage to say the least. The folks wielding iMUSE clearly knew what they had.

[mock-possum]

> I don't think any modern system even tries to do those seamless transitions from one music piece to another.

You will be pleased to hear that plenty of games since then have continued to use that same technique, and there are in fact entire realms of game dev systems dedicated to enable that experience!

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Dynamic music systems are standard in modern game development: https://www.fmod.com/studio

(Whether or not the game actually does anything interesting with them is its own question.)

[forrestthewoods]

> I don't think any modern system even tries to do those seamless transitions from one music piece to another.

Games definitely do this.

[fifticon]

I might deceive myself, but as I recall, I was vary satisfied with how world of warcraft handled environmental music changes. imuse may be a whole other level though.

[dcl]

You have awakened some incredible memories. I know exactly what you are talking about.