Notes

Short pieces, published as they are finished.

Middleware did not invent adaptive music

It is easy to date interactive scoring to the arrival of commercial audio middleware, because that is when it got a vocabulary and a sales pitch. The technique is a decade older. Muting and unmuting channels of a running module does the same job as crossfading stems, with less flexibility and no licence fee. What middleware added was not the idea but the ability to hand it to a team that does not program.

Why loops got longer

When memory stopped being scarce, the obvious move was to write longer cues so the repeat is less noticeable. It works, and it also hides bad looping rather than fixing it. A two minute loop with a clumsy seam is still a clumsy seam, the player just meets it less often. The scores that hold up over a long session are the ones where the return point was designed, not padded.

The sound of a sample budget

Ask people what nineties PC game music sounds like and they will describe a character, not a genre: dry, punchy, a little metallic, drums slightly forward. That is not a style anyone chose. It is what you get when the entire instrument set has to fit in a few hundred kilobytes and every sample is trimmed to the shortest usable loop. Constraints leave fingerprints.