Communicating in a networked world
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Most of my group of tight buddies (and of course all the boys in the family) like Björk — a lot. Personally, I like both the tormented lyrics and the music.
So when Jason sent me a link to the “latest technology—the ReacTable” that is said to be used by Björk in performance, it was novel but also reminded me of a little toy that my sister-in-law’s kids have had for about a year now.
I track the game-developer world to a limited extent (because I work on real-world pervasive games), and today I ran across an article by Andrew Clark in Gamasutra describing what he calls adaptive music. Very few online articles keep me reading from start to finish – and a four-part article is even less likely to do so.
Why did this article intrigue me so much? Well, first, I have been a musician (to some degree) since I was five years old; and second, I’ve been writing educational (computer-based) games and programs since 1978. And I’ve always wanted to incorporate sound and music when it was possible. At the age of 18 I was faced with a flip-the-coin decision between engineering and music. My piano teacher told me that I could embark on a life of music and perhaps if I worked really hard I could make it – but that it was more likely that I’d be a “talented amateur” rather than a successful professional musician. So I went with engineering, and ended up in computer science.
But when personal computers came along, I tried to incorporate music wherever I could. When I started a company (in 1980 – DesignWare) to create educational titles for kids and we started working on the new Apple-II, we had little musical themes that popped out of nowhere when the game started up.
What Andrew calls adaptive music is the kind of music that appears in today’s video games that “tracks” in some ways the action and stages of the game itself.