Computer-Generated Music for Tabletop Role-Playing Games
This addresses the need for automated, emotion-adaptive music in tabletop gaming, but it is incremental as it builds on existing speech and music generation techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of generating background music for tabletop role-playing games by developing Bardo Composer, which uses speech recognition and a new Stochastic Bi-Objective Beam Search method to create music based on player emotions; a user study with 116 participants showed that the generated music was as accurately identified for emotion as human-written pieces.
In this paper we present Bardo Composer, a system to generate background music for tabletop role-playing games. Bardo Composer uses a speech recognition system to translate player speech into text, which is classified according to a model of emotion. Bardo Composer then uses Stochastic Bi-Objective Beam Search, a variant of Stochastic Beam Search that we introduce in this paper, with a neural model to generate musical pieces conveying the desired emotion. We performed a user study with 116 participants to evaluate whether people are able to correctly identify the emotion conveyed in the pieces generated by the system. In our study we used pieces generated for Call of the Wild, a Dungeons and Dragons campaign available on YouTube. Our results show that human subjects could correctly identify the emotion of the generated music pieces as accurately as they were able to identify the emotion of pieces written by humans.