DirectMusic For The Masses

DirectMusic For The Masses

Introduction History DirectMusic's Innards Segments, Tracks and Tools Programming The DMS Loader Output API Basic Playback Layers Composing With Producer How Deep Do You Want To Go Today? The Future

DirectMusic's Interactive Music engine can be used to varying degrees. The deepest levels are only going to be of interest to a few developers, as they get into rather specialized solutions. The simplest level should be of interest to plenty of developers: just import one or more MIDI files, each as a segment, and thus make them available to the API for queuing and scheduling.

The next level gets into a data type called a Style. Styles contain patterns (Figure 6), which are like MIDI sequence files in that they contain one or more parts, each with a single instrument, that can be set to play with no randomness or variation. So, conceptually, the simplest style is just like a MIDI file.

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Figure 6: Pattern Screen Shot

Going one step deeper, you can add variations to individual parts (Figure 7). Typically, these are made by copying the contents of a part and adding or subtracting notes to change its feel and density. You can tie together variations in different parts within a style, so that they encompass more than one instrument. These variations can then be chosen either by the game's code or by parameters set within the music engine.

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Figure 7: Adding a Part Variation...

A more basic parameter for selecting patterns is a number ranging from 1 to 100 called Groove Level. Groove Level can derive from a Groove Track, but it can also be set by your game based upon state variables. The more intense the state of things, the higher the Groove Level. This lets DirectMusic choose patterns based upon the groove ranges assigned to them by the composer.

More than one pattern can play at once. Unless a secondary pattern has tempo data associated with it, it will take its timing from the main pattern. A specialized type of pattern, called a motif, is intended to be triggered by events. Motifs generally consist of only one or two instruments and are short. The simplest example might be a single drum hit.

Up to this level, no actual notes are being generated or even bent by the music engine. It's simply been storing, playing, and combining musical elements that were fully composed by a human being. The most extensive use of this engine in a game to date, Monolith's SHOGO - MOBILE ARMOR DIVISION, went no deeper than this.

The next step, if you take it, starts automatically transposing some notes. This involves a segment track type called a chord progression (Figure 8). To use one, abstract the chord changes from your piece of music and use DirectMusic Producer to place them in a chord progression track within the segment. On playback, the style engine recreates the proper notes by mapping the notes in the style to the harmonic information within the chords. Each chord supports up to four subchords, called levels.

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Figure 8: Chord Progression Screen Shot

Using chord progressions requires building in a bit more information into your parts and variations. Various attributes can be set at levels ranging down to the individual note to determine whether or not a musical element can be transposed by a chord, and if so how (Figure 9). Variations can be set to play only at certain scale positions or junctures. Parts can be assigned to different levels within the chords.

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Figure 9: Note Attributes Screen Shot

Beyond this, DirectMusic includes templates and chord maps (formerly called personalities), which the composition engine can use to automatically generate segments (Figure 10). A template is a segment that has everything for style playback except the chord progression track. Instead, the template includes a sign post track, which defines a road map for how to place chords in the chord progression. A separate file known as a chord map defines the actual chords as well as rules for mapping them to the sign post track. These include sign post chord definitions and a tree graph of chord connections. The composer who creates the template can build in weights for the probability of choosing one chord over another at a given juncture in the music.

Figure 10: Template/ Segment Relationship

The composition engine combines the chord map and template to create a style playback segment with the resulting chord progression, along with the template's groove track and style playback track. By combining different chord maps and styles with a single template, an application freshly composes musical variations for each scene.

And then there are shapes, which actually generate templates: "Give me forty bars of music that rise, and then a snappy 12-bar coda." It's a bit more involved than that, but you get the idea.

By the time you're using shapes, the chord progression is truly generative, but the original composition work that went into the style still peeks through. For more information on templates and shapes, see the documentation on Microsoft's DirectX web site.

Templates and shapes can create style playback segments offline, for example during a game level load. This won't interrupt whatever playback DirectMusic is up to at the time.