Chapter 21: Beyond Games: Bringing DirectMusic into the Living Room


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Overview

Tobin Buttram

What people are going to be selling more of in the future is not pieces of music but systems by which people can customize listening experiences for themselves In that sense, musicians would be offering unfinished pieces of music — pieces of raw material, but highly evolved raw material, that has a strong flavor to it already. I can also feel something evolving on the cusp between "music," "game," and "demonstration".... Such an experience falls in a nice new place — between art and science and playing. This is where I expect artists to be working more and more in the future.

Brian Eno in WIRED issue 3.05 — http://www.wired.com/wired/3.05/eno.html?pg=4&topic=

Although DirectMusic provides many solutions to the challenge of crafting a cinematic underscore that responds in sync with the unpredictable unfolding of computer game events (as is evident in the excellent work of composers like Guy Whitmore, Nathan Grigg, and others), the greatest untapped potential of DirectMusic resides in the very nature of its nonlinear playback architecture and its widespread install base as part of the DirectX APIs. Nonlinear music is currently at the far frontier of music production technology. As such, it requires composers and designers to develop new compositional, recording, and playback techniques, even new ways of thinking about music. In return, it offers the possibility of discovering and delivering qualitatively new musical experiences to the worldwide community of tech-enabled music listeners.

It's beyond the scope of this article to exhaustively document why and how a nonlinear music format represents an important "next step" in the evolution of music production. I only hope to convey the challenges and the rewards that the current "state of the nonlinear art" offers to both composers and listeners. In order to demonstrate what nonlinearity offers in terms of musical experiences I first recount a little of the history of early recording technology and how the introduction of linear playback brought with it an often overlooked paradigm shift that still affects how music is both perceived and conceived today. We look at DirectMusic as the basis for stand-alone nonlinear music content. We also look at the example Segment included on the companion CD: a full bandwidth, nonlinear music file made in collaboration with ProjeKct X (the "R&D division" of the seminal rock group King Crimson: Pat Mastelotto, Trey Gunn, Adrian Belew, and Robert Fripp). From there, I present my view of the challenges unique to nonlinear composition that a composer must take into account when working in this still very new and uncharted territory and present and explain some "conceptual keys" that I've found useful in my work.




DirectX 9 Audio Exposed(c) Interactive Audio Development
DirectX 9 Audio Exposed: Interactive Audio Development
ISBN: 1556222882
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 170

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