Recreating tracker music sequencers in modern videogames: an integrated model approach for adaptive music

Abstract

Music plays a very important role in video-games contributing to the game's atmosphere and immersion. It also operates at a cognitive level, namely in memory triggering feelings such as nostalgia. Theme songs from several classics, both from gameplay or the main menu are still remembered today and will probably never be forgotten. During video-games' evolution, several technological iterations and increments arose, both for graphics and audio, as means to achieve better quality for the final product. Thus, many editing tools for adaptive audio or soundtracks are available today and pursuing an inherent concern: the game's music should ideally be dynamic, in the sense that it must adapt to the player's actions, as opposed to something that is static and perceived as continuously looping. A software that enables this kind of approach with ease is a kind of music sequencers, commonly named Trackers, that are somewhat underused/obsolete these days. This technology, which comes from the Commodore Amiga times, brought many advantages over previous solutions and offers a very small storage footprint. With this, musicians and programmers found a new method for music creation and expression, that marked many gamers during the 90's. Nowadays there's little development and support for these sequencers, due to new solutions appearing with a lot of potential, although these don't share many of the trackers' advantages, thus being unable to completely replace the tracker. This study focuses on the development of an architecture that can play music composed on a tracker, using current resources and frameworks, offering compatibility with modern game engines and allowing the expansion of the traditional trackers workflow and possibilities. A prototype was developed based on an existing and updated application, from which its features and file formats were studied. Following this phase, the prototype was tested on the engine with a game developed specifically for the purpose, where several results were collected. From the observation and analysis of the results, it was possible to create a song with tempo control, instruments, musical patterns and many other elements. This track can be stored in a group of files with a relatively small size compared to other existing solutions.