Trigger Happy
blessed with total sonic freedom, because videogame systems (apart from the poor Nintendo 64) now read music directly off a CD, so soundtracks are recorded with full banks of pro-quality digital instruments and no restrictions on epic breadth. Sometimes the music may even be recorded by a full orchestra of live musicians, as is the case with Outcast.
The problem with such scores, even when—as is increasingly the case—they are highly competent and pleasing pieces of music in their own right, is that, unlike the videogame’s visuals, they are not interactive. A film score is written to accompany a predetermined and unchanging visual story. So it is recorded once and cast in stone. But videogames can change from one moment to the next depending on what the player does. One way round this is just to cut in a rather ugly fashion from a light-hearted piece of music to a doom- laden one when something bad happens onscreen. Microsoft has developed a system called Direct Music that hopes to automate this technique more smoothly. But all this means in practice is that the composer writes tiny little “cells” of music a few bars long that are then algorithmically combined into longer episodes by the processing engine. (Avant-garde classical musicians had exactly this idea of combining cells in the 1960s.)
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