We at Claynote love making music. Besides composing 'regular', linear music, Claynote specializes in Adaptive Music.
Adaptive music is music that is able to adapt itself
to any parameter in any context you desire.
to any parameter in any context you desire.
In a First Person Shooter computer game for example, the musical score can be made to react to the health bar of your game character, or to the amount of enemies in your vicinity. Or both, combined with your hit-miss ratio, so that the music really represents how well you are playing the game.
Outside the computer environment you can imagine adaptive music being used to support an audio tour in a museum, aptly changing the musical background atmosphere to the position of the listener, who is wandering through the various exhibitions at their own pace and leisure.
However you want to implement it, adaptive music always has two great advantages:
1) Adaptive music will increase the immersion of the listener. Since our adaptive music reacts to parameters that are relevant to the activity the listener is in, the musical changes will always emphasize the changes in the listener's mood. You can think of adaptive music as a film score, performed live for unscripted events.
2) The changes within adaptive music can be a way of communicating with the listener. Because music acts instantly on such an emotional level inside our brains, we can use adaptive music to let listeners know that something has changed, and how to feel about this change.
We at Claynote have been focusing on adaptive music since 2005.
The following video is a clear visual representation of the way adaptive music can improve a game, as is described above. The game is Far Cry (Crytek Studios, 2004), to which we added our adaptive music system, G.A.M.E. The music responds to a combination of parameters, such as the health bar, distance to enemies and hit/miss ratio.
For more information about our research or to receive our papers on Adaptive Music in games, don't hesitate to write to us at info@claynote.nl
