Adaptive Music Composition for Games
This addresses the challenge of creating more immersive and emotive game experiences for gamers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing adaptive music techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of generating music that adapts dynamically to game content and actions to enhance immersion, by integrating cognitive models and multi-agent composition techniques into an Adaptive Music System (AMS). The result showed that gamers reported higher immersion and better correlation of music with game-world concepts compared to original soundtracks in two distinct games.
The generation of music that adapts dynamically to content and actions has an important role in building more immersive, memorable and emotive game experiences. To date, the development of adaptive music systems for video games is limited by both the nature of algorithms used for real-time music generation and the limited modelling of player action, game world context and emotion in current games. We propose that these issues must be addressed in tandem for the quality and flexibility of adaptive game music to significantly improve. Cognitive models of knowledge organisation and emotional affect are integrated with multi-modal, multi-agent composition techniques to produce a novel Adaptive Music System (AMS). The system is integrated into two stylistically distinct games. Gamers reported an overall higher immersion and correlation of music with game-world concepts with the AMS than with the original game soundtracks in both games.