Diegetic Music - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 67

degree of disruption. Likewise for the size of the
pitch interval: for example, the diatonic neighbor
(half and whole step) with small errors and big-
ger intervals the more the musician is distracted.
In the same way rhythmic precision and syn-
chrony can be manipulated. Making musicians
asynchronous simply means adding a plain delay
that puts some of them ahead and others behind
in the ensemble play. The rhythmic precision, by
contrast, has to do with the timing of a musician.
Does he play properly in time or is he “stumbling”,
in other words, unrhythmical? Such timing aspects
were described, investigated, and implemented
by Friberg et al. (2006) and Berndt and Hähnel
(2009) amongst others. As ensemble play is also
a form of communication between musicians,
one inaccurate player affects the whole ensemble,
beginning with the direct neighbor. They will, of
course, try to come together again which can be
emulated by homeostatic (self-balancing) systems.
Such self-regulating processes were, for instance,
described by Eldridge (2002) and used for serial
music composition.
Constructive interaction , by contrast, influ-
ences musical structure. Imagine a jazz band
cheered by the audience, encouraged to try more
adventurous improvisations. Imagine a street
musician playing some depressive music. But
when giving him a coin he becomes cheerful,
his music likewise. Such effects can rarely be
found in virtual gaming worlds up to now. The
adventure game Monkey Island 3: The Curse of
Monkey Island (LucasArts, 1997) features one of
the most famous and visionary exceptions. In one
scene the player's pirate crew sings the song “A
Pirate I Was Meant To Be.” The player chooses
the keywords with which the next verse has to
rhyme. The task is to select the one that nobody
finds a rhyme for, to bring them back to work.
The sequential order of verses and interludes is
adapted according to the multiple-choice decisions
that the player makes. A systematic overview of
this and further approaches to nonlinear music is
given by Berndt (2009).

So much effort, such a large and complex
arsenal for mostly subsidiary background music?
Do we really require all this? The answer is ”no”.
This section proposed a collection of tools of which
the one or other can be useful for rounding off
the coherence of the staging and to strengthen the
believability of the music performance. Moreover,
these tools establish the necessary foundations for
music to be more than a background prop, but to
come to the fore as an interactive element of the
scene. This opens up the unique opportunity for
the player to experience music and its performance
in a completely different way, namely close up.

VIsUALIZED MUsIc

Beyond visualizing only the performance of
music, that is showing performing musicians or
sound sources as discussed so far, there is a further
possibility: the visualization of music itself. In
fact, it is not music as a whole that is visualized
but rather a selection of structural features of a
musical composition (rhythmic patterns, melodic
contour and so on). Moreover, the visual scene
must not be completely generated from musical
information. Music video games just like music
video clips often feature a collage-like combina-
tion of realistic and aesthetically stylized visuals.
The latter is the focus of this section.
The Guitar Hero series (Harmonix, 2006-2009)
works with such collage-like combinations. While
a concert performance is shown in the background
the foreground illustrates the guitar riffs which
the player has to perform. PaRappa the Rapper
(NanaOn-Sha, 1996) also shows the performers
on screen and an unobtrusive line of symbols on
top that indicates the type of interaction (which
keys to press) and the timing to keep up with
the music. In Audiosurf , by contrast, the whole
scene is built up through music: the routing of the
obstacle course, the positioning of obstacles and
items, the color scheme, background objects, and
visual effects, even the driving speed. So music