Claynote - (adaptive) music

Shootin' Cybertrash is a side-scrolling shooter game developed by Xform which you can play for free on Xform's own website. Claynote went full-on retro synth rock on this soundtrack, making the game an all-round old school shooter experience.

Army of the Damned, developed by Xform is a browser-based first person zombie shooter in which you get to shoot your way through waves and waves of zombies to stop them feasting on your brain. Claynote composed and produced a fast-paced heavy metal soundtrack for this energetic shooter, which you can play for free on the Shockwave online games section and other gaming portals.

Delicious, Gamehouse's immensely popular time management series, has its seventh installment in Delicious - Emily's True Love.

For this new Delicious title, Gamehouse approached five Dutch game music composers to pitch their ideas on how the new theme song should sound. You can listen to Claynote's composition below. Usually we do not publicly present our pitch entries, especially when we don't win the pitch. But since this particular pitch process has already been published in Control magazine, it would be unfair to withhold our entry from you on our own website.

In cooperation with the Bartiméus Accessibility Foundation, Claynote developed the audio assets for a messaging application similar to Skype, MSN Messenger or WhatsApp, which was specifically designed for deaf-blind people. Initially the users would communicate short messages entirely through the vibrations of a phone, but because the application's target audience is not limited to people who are both deaf and blind, but also otherwise disabled people and their carers and/or family, simple but effective visual an auditory cues were added to the system. Claynote designed straightforward 'audio icons' for this application.

When Firefox 4 was released, the newly implemented web socket technology allowed it to run multiplayer games.

To promote this feature, Mozilla requested some games to be playable on the release of the fourth version of their browser. Claynote, along with a team of programmer, artist and game designer friends designed and built a browser-based multiplayer strategic pirate game called Scurvy Bums

Bohm is a zen-like experience about creating a tree. As a player you explore the level of interaction you have. Discovering the different ways you control and manipulate your tree is all part of the game experience. Bohm is about slow gameplay. Growing, creating branches, pushing your tree into strange shapes, and discovering how beautiful and relaxing these simple processes can be. Every tree is generated procedurally while you play. As the tree grows, so does the adaptive music. Both change and evolve over time, under the influence of buttons pressed and decisions made. Bohm is not about winning, but about letting yourself get carried away in an aesthetic and auditory poetic experience. An interactive homage to the beauty, slowness and peace of nature.

In November 2010, Claynote was asked to provide their expertise for a Philips project. Unfortunately, details can not be disclosed at this time.

Rate My Avatar is an application developed by Projectorgames, that lets players rate other players avatars. With this application it's easier than ever to find out how cool your avatar really looks and what the rest of the world thinks about your avatar. Available on Xbox Live, and popular from the first week. Claynote made music for the main rating section of this game.

Set up by UMC Utrecht (University Medical Centre Utrecht) and TNO (Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research), and organised through Task Force Innovation Utrecht and Dutch Game Garden. Claynote was asked to generate ideas for the creation of a game, intended to educate and motivate obese children. The concept created by Claynote consisted of a gaming platform on mobile devices, that would allow children to play games like hide and seek and human stratego. These mobile devices would aid the children in playing these games by keeping track of player positions and movements, while also providing an improved experience by providing an interesting context through graphics and sound effects.

Das Dream is a musical performance piece by Das Band, a music/theatre group from Amsterdam. We crafted about a dozen unique soundscape intermezzos for this dreamy show.

For this Xbox Live Indie Games title, Claynote designed a rather complex adaptive music system. This side-scrolling retro racing game has the player influencing the pounding techno track, with every movement in the race, every crash into a wall and every boost pad successfully hit. It changes the music according to your ranking in a race, and has different musical endings depending on which place you finish. The game even features a Freestyle Mode, in which the player can compose their own music by using the side-scrolling racing action as a rudimentary music sequencer.

Released exclusively via Xbox Live Indie Games, the goal of this puzzle game is to collect Easter eggs in a physics-based 2D platform environment. Claynote composed all sound effects and music, which was praised as being sensationally cheesy and catchy.

Originally released as the Easter-themed A Great Easter Egg Hunt, the game was later rebranded and re-released as Choc-o-riffic. Because chocolate eggs are yummy all year round.

Playing Frogger with 512 players simultaneously? It has been made possible by ProjectorGames, a British game developer. Projected on a wall, up to 512 players can try to guide their own frog to safety in this adaptation of the classic arcade game. Claynote provided a thumping soundtrack, intensifying with every level.

We have been advising the Association of Public Labraries (V.O.B.) since 2007, highlighting the properties of adaptive music as an interface for the public library of the future. Viewing the library as an information hub, instead of a collection of books, and using the theory of multiple intelligences, the public library needs to create a more fluid interface to cater to a wider audience. Our findings on the functions of adaptive music have been greatly appreciated, and are now the conceptual starting point of designing such an interface.

After finishing the design of our newly developed adaptive music engine, G.A.M.E., we invited the entire audio team from Guerrilla Games, one of Europe's leading game developers and well known for their Killzone series on the Playstation platforms, to provide us with feedback on our ideas from a professional viewpoint. We presented them with our ideas on adaptive music for first person shooters, and in subsequent meetings explained the ins and outs of our adaptive music engine. The Guerilla audio team were very enthusiastic about the underlying principles of our music system and could see it working very well in an FPS game. When Killzone 2 was released two years later, it sported a music engine very similar to our G.A.M.E. We are not suggesting anything.

While still in art school, we designed an adaptive music engine for first person shooter games and implemented it in Crytek's marvellous game Far Cry. Based on a combination of the player's level of success, level of threat and position within the game world, the musical score would adapt. The results were spectacular, greatly improving Far Cry's original music design. This project was generally considered the most interesting and innovative music project of the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU) of 2007.