Algorithmic music as intelligent game music

Current game music systems typically involve the playback of prerecorded audio tracks which are crossfaded in response to game events such as level changes. However, crossfading can limit the expressive power of musical transitions, and can make fine grained structural variations difficult to achieve. We therefore describe an alternative approach in which music is algorithmically generated based on a set of high-level musical features that can be controlled in real-time according to a player’s progression through a game narrative. We outline an implementation of the approach in an actual game, focusing primarily on how the music system traces the game’s emotional narrative by periodically querying certain narrative parameters and adjusting the musical features of its output accordingly.