Music - Tracks & Time

[Sean Doherty]

Any one have any generally recommendation for the number of unique tracks you should have in a game. Example game would be Starchon or something from the action and arcade genre. Also what is a recommended duration for a track? Keep in mind that music pricing is by the minute.

[steve bisson]

i guess it depends how long your levels are ? i hate when the song loops too often in a level. Try to clear a level at normal speed and see how long it takes, maybe you should use that as an indicator ?

20 to 30 minutes seems good for the whole sountrack of a game of this type

[AnthemAudio]

One thing to consider is how "casual" your game is. If it's fairly casual then they will pay attention to the music a bit more and will notice shorter loops sooner. You'll definitely want longer tracks with a moderate amount of variance. If it's more of an action game with a sporadic amount of frenzy then a shorter loop can be used because chances are they will only pay attention to it between the action and may not notice as easy.

With pricing per minute you'll want to make sure you get the bang for your buck. Your best bet overall then is to have your musician write something that moves from one idea to another with as little repeating elements as possible. That way whenever a player happens to listen to the music, chances are he or she will catch different parts of the song and not catch on to any repetitive elements. Of course this depends on whoever you hired whether they can condense ideas and flow freely from one piece to another and be able to bring it back to the beginning as a solid loop.

There is a difference between those than can write for this medium and those who just write songs. One instance I bring up from time to time was a project I worked on that had made good use of randomization. That is, I wrote one song that broke up every 16 bars of music or so into smaller clips. Then through a basic randomizing playlist the game would play the clips of the song in random order so you would never hear the same song twice. Not only did I have to chop up numerous sections of the song into palatable tracks for integration, but I had to write and plan with the idea that at every 16 bar interval any part of the song could come right after it without any jarring or noticeable "seams". More difficult than you think, but it paid off.

This method allows you to have a small number of shorter tracks that loop fairly often without annoying the player or allow things to become irritating or predictable. You can turn four 3-minute songs into hours of gameplay, easy. Should save you money if your musician can handle this.

[Sirrus]

Around 15 minutes of game music seems rather standard for casual games...

[zoombapup]

Why not just test it?

Get the game you are talking about. Find its music files, play them, count the length.

Its as accurate an estimate as your going to get.

[dflash]

AnthemAudio is definitely making a good suggestion. There are ways to stretch out the amount of actual composed music. Whatever technique is used for playback, the key is modularity - just like in coding. Creating 8, 16 bar modules of music that can be reused and recombined to reduce the perceived repetition factor.

[lennard]

AnthemAudio, do you know what codec was used to play back your chopped up pieces? Was there dead time between each. I've been looking to switch to audiere because it handles Ogg Vorbis and is free :) anybody else have any suggestions?

[bluejay]

Lennard,

instead of directly play one song after another, you should have the codec dove tail (crossfade) the end of one song and beginning of another together to get it sound seamless.
I personally has never been a big fan of using small segment of chopped music, it always sound forced and the likely hood of running into repetition is higher due to the small segments.

[dflash]

bluejay,

Well it's just one option, but I think it is a valid option.

Of course there will be repetition, but human beings like repetition in music to a certain degree. U2 is a lot more popular then John Cage. Anthem's example is the extreme, but you can have more subtle degrees of randomness that will help eliminate the 1 minute loop that never changes syndrome.

The end result of it sounding forced is possible, but it really means that it wasn't done very well. The problem lies in the the execution, not the design.

[bluejay]

DF,

I am not totally against using randomization in soundtrack, but I think doing it with full length track is more effective then using small segments. just my $0.02 :)

[AnthemAudio]

AnthemAudio, do you know what codec was used to play back your chopped up pieces? Was there dead time between each. I've been looking to switch to audiere because it handles Ogg Vorbis and is free :) anybody else have any suggestions?

For that particular project we used OGG. There wasn't any hiccup in playback, it all sounded like one song.

Regarding this use of audio, no it won't work in every situation. The use of dynamic soundtracks for instance, would render this method useless and just as static as a regular song played. I'm thinking more of the casual market where there is typically a just static song played over gameplay looped to infinity. Why not mix it up a bit if possible?

The whole point in me mentioning this was to use as little music as possible to stretch your budget, especially if you're buying per minute or have file size limitations imposed (like in the handheld market).

It's one of the many plagues for composers, how to turn one hour of song into 40 hours of gameplay. Or if you're Jeremy Soule, just write 3 hours of music for 8 hours of gameplay and call it good (see: Prey). Nothing against the content here at all, though maybe a bit overkill with the material. Then again he did score it like a film and not like a game...

But I digress...

I'd link you to the game to check this all out but their website has been down and I don't know if it will be back up. Here's a trailer I've shown here a few times on different occasions. The soundtrack was randomly generated, then played over the edits. Didn't sound too bad to me, then again I'm biased.

http://www.anthem-audio.com/demos/BallsToTheWallTrailer2.wmv

So I had four songs in there, each around 2 minutes long. So 8 minutes of music that seemed to stretch out indefinitely without annoying anyone...or mostly anyone. Seemed like a good idea and semi-original.

Tony