Authoring Flexible Content for Dynamic Playback

Playing back long MIDI sequences isn't going to be particularly interactive, so we might want to take this opportunity to consider alternative solutions to strictly linear scores. For instance, you might want to "chop up" your score into smaller pieces of music that can smoothly flow into each other. Authoring music in this kind of segmented (no pun intended) manner can be as simple as creating a bunch of short looping clips, each of which follows the same progression, perhaps deviating in terms of instrumentation and ornamentation. Alternatively, the various sections could be much more distinct, and you could author transitional pieces of audio content that help "bridge" different areas of the music. In every case, you need to consider the balance between truly "interactive" audio (that is, music that can jump to a different emotional state quickly) and musical concepts such as form, melodic line, and so on. That is, how can a piece of music quickly and constantly switch emotional levels and still sound musically convincing? Finding a balance here is perhaps one of the most significant challenges in creating dynamic audio content, and this challenge is addressed by specific composers in Unit III.