Interactive Music...er, Audio

Hey big boy, what's the name on your box?

Let's take a look at what marketing has been has been up to. Even with all of our intellect, the insidious nature of marketing still seems to ensnare us. We know that buxom, scantily clad women are not going to flock to us because of the brand of beer we drink, but we might buy a particular brand based on this idea anyway.

Marketing is telling us that gamers will flock to a game if a recognizable band is on the box. I think id Software helped set the stage for making this idea seem reasonable with Quake. Sure, people thought it was really cool that Trent Reznor did the ambient tracks for Quake and yes it was a big seller, but I never heard anyone say they bought Quake or played it any longer because of that. I think Id deserves more credit for the success of Quake than that. How long did it take for you to turn the music off or put in your own selection of tunes? Ah what the heck, it's only money. After all, you have to spend money to make money right? So let's throw a briefcase full of it at a big name band to write some tunes for the next title (by the way don't forget where that money will come from later… your share).

This scheme would appear on the surface to be a reasonable strategy. The marketing guys (or gals) words of wisdom? "They use popular bands in Hollywood movies to get the title more notice". This conjures up an image of your game as a big screen movie with the associated notoriety and revenue. As with most schemes born from the shear will of marketing, it's only superficial. Once you peel back the top layer and shine an emotion free light of clarity on this idea we can examine the true nature of the scheme. A movie costs $8.50 to see ($8.50! when did that happen?) not $50. When was the last time you heard someone say "Gee I'm really not into RTS games but I dropped 50 bucks on it anyway because 'Big hair band' did the music"? Yeah, that's what I thought. It might sell you some soundtracks if you are lucky -- and there is nothing wrong with that -- but it won't sell games.

Let's get back to reality for a moment. Our goal is to get better audio technology to enhance the gaming experience. And I'm sorry but games are NOT like Hollywood movies. Games are interactive and provide a completely different experience and, hopefully, your audience will be involved with your product for more than 90-180 minutes. Currently, the sonic quality available to games is no different than that in a movie or a CD so what can 'Big Hair Band' really offer you? Their name? At what price?

The process of design, delivery and implementation is very different in radio, movies and games. What was the last movie you saw where one 'band' did the entire musical score? There's a reason why you can't recall any. Writing songs for an album is very different than producing a score for a movie or a game. 'Big Hair Band', has spent their entire career focused on perfecting the process of writing music for the radio, not on the very different and specialized art of composing for games or movies. What makes you think they suddenly understand the dynamics of composing the entire soundscape for your game? Besides 'Big Hair Band' probably needs to get another record out to pay back their label for making them a success, so why are they making a detour to spend the required time making game music? Perhaps they are in a slump (why would you want to use them in this case anyway?) and they want a little publicity and some cash. Of course, you'll hear no mention of any of this from those brilliant marketing guys.

And by the way, the only interactive music 'Big Hair Band' knows about is a live performance. So you're going to get some tunes from 'Big Hair Band' that are going to loop over and over and over. There is really no effective way to make it interactive, so the gamer, after hearing the same tracks repeatedly, eventually shuts the music off. At that moment they lose everything that the music was meant to bring to the game, like emersion in the environment and a vehicle for a wide variety of emotion. Most people just can't listen to the same songs repeatedly for any length of time without getting sick of them. Have you ever turned on the radio and there it was again, that damn song that was so cool last month but just got played to death? Did you change the radio station after only hearing the first few seconds of that song? Think about what you're actually going to get for your money and give to your audience for theirs. I know I'd rather have something that enhances the experience instead of some marketing hype.

Ok folks, it's safe to come out now.

So why are developers so afraid of interactive audio? Fear is most commonly associated with a lack of knowledge or understanding. Fear of what we don't understand, don't know or even what we think we know. There are plenty of reasons for developers to be gun shy about interactive audio. Some of you were around to see the failings of Adaptive Audio and everybody has heard MIDI music or played a game with MIDI music. It's left a bad taste in our collective mouths about the quality of the sound. Once it gets out of the safety of our controlled environment and into that cheapo sound card out there, as Sol Rosenberg would put it, "it don't sound so good".

Apart from a very few developers creating their own proprietary music engines, there hasn't been much in the way of interactive audio software available to play around with. You can walk into any music store and find quite a few different audio software packages and some MIDI software products,l but no interactive audio products. We've seen a few attempts at interactive audio software in different incarnations at trade shows -- you know what I'm talking about, those wacky programs that generate music at random or let you piece together riffs to form a song. Composers and developers alike hate them because they make some pretty ugly and generic 'music', but they seem to be back in a booth every year. These programs spring to mind when someone says interactive audio, which adds fuel to the fire. Due to a lack of information on the subject, a lot of developers just don't know anything about interactive audio so we are left with the bad taste of failed attempts, hearsay and misinformation as the basis of the fear.

And the winner is…
The award for the group most responsible for the lack of interactive audio goes to, "envelope please… The Composers!" This is the worst part because we are the ones in the position to drive the technology. It's our job as professionals to keep current on our craft, develop communication with manufacturers to guide the technology in the direction we want and need and inform our employers of new or better technologies. Why are we ignoring other avenues? One problem is that there are few dedicated game audio composers. Most have either been full time employees of the developer or publisher who may have other tasks like programming to deal with as well. If that's not the case, they generally have a tight schedule to adhere to and little time to futz around with new technology. Mostly, however, they work in other entertainment fields like TV, movies or radio. They are not very interested in trying to learn or help develop a technology that is useless in other industries where the audio is linear. As a side note for developers and publishers, you should consider hiring sound designers who care not only about the quality of the audio they produce but also for the advancement of the game industry. We'll all benefit from that.

Another problem is that we are so happy to finally be able to use CD quality music and sound effects in games that we've gotten tunnel vision. Right now we are enjoying this ability but we need to pay attention to where we are going, lest we get lost. Eventually we'll put our eyes back on the road only to find out that we've fallen seriously behind again. Do we, as audio content providers, want to remain hapless victims? Forced to follow along in the wake of the industry instead of helping to steer it? Hey, we all need to eat, but that is the short-term gain at the expense of the long-term benefit. I know it's easier to give the developer what he's asking for rather than try to figure out a new technology and while it may quite satisfying to hear such beautiful sounds coming from dimly lit living rooms, bedrooms and offices, but it's not the prize. Don't get me wrong, we've made great strides with the audio quality in games and there is definitely a place in almost any game for good old Redbook audio. But there is something even better down the road and we're neglecting it. The true reward is to have all of that and the ability to make it interactive.

Are we there yet?
In the past, all we had to work with were little beeps and whatnot from that tiny speaker inside the PC case. Not much need to worry about quality audio. Then came along the soundcard and you could actually play music. And so MIDI was born. Why MIDI? Well, there was no such thing as a CD and a hard drive was as big as the PC itself. MIDI was developed as a way around the hardware and software limitations of the time. MIDI was and still is a marvelous technology. While the MIDI standard was a necessary step in PC audio evolution it still sounded, well… like MIDI. This is because although MIDI became standardized, the quality of the synthesizer and instrument patches used by the device to play it back has had no such standardization. When I say "patches" I'm talking about the sounds MIDI uses to replicate instruments, also referred to as 'instrument banks'. These all vary greatly in quality from sound card to sound card. That quality is usually directly related to the price of the sound card. When you're spending big dollars on a PC, adding another $200 for a quality sound card is a lot harder to swallow than $30. As we've all heard a million times (why doesn't it sink in?), "You get what you pay for".

Other technologies have come along, but they were and still are proprietary in nature, and that puts us right back to the problem of having a myriad of sound cards in use with varying degrees of compatibility and quality. It would seem that MIDI has seen it's day as a viable solution to our interactive audio dilemma. This is unfortunate because MIDI talks to the computer in a language it can understand, making it fast, programmable and flexible enough to be interactive, and its file size is unbeatable. With the industry moving rapidly towards online gaming, file size is again a major concern. A two minute audio track at 16bit/44100hz (CD quality) will be about 20 MB (10 MB per minute of sound) try downloading ten or more tracks, as well as the game, at 56K.