Adaptive game scoring with ambient music
Axel Berndt · University of Huddersfield Press eBooks · 2019
Game scoring: music meets interactionMusic is an integral part of video games.Since the minimalistic beeps and bleeps of the earliest games the overwhelming majority come with their own more or less elaborate music.Similar to early film music, 1 early game music served as a replacement for missing sound effects, which was still the case in many video games of the 1990s. 2For several decades, gaming hardware was hardly able to produce naturalistic sound effects due to technological limitations.Sound synthesis technology for games of this time included standard waveform oscillators (such as square, saw and triangle), limited amplitude and frequency modulation, and basic filters (offered by only few sound chips).The stylized sound effects they produce established a unique aesthetic that continues today as part of our media culture, for instance in the chiptune genre.The uniqueness of these aesthetics becomes salient when experienced in other media contexts where naturalistic sounds are more common, such as in films, e.g. in The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, 3 an animated television show that is based on the eponymous Nintendo games series. 4 These sound effects are closer to musical idents than filmic Foley aesthetics and can still be found today, for instance when games reward 1