篇目1，论述在游戏中植入音乐的挑战和解决方案

作者：Marcelo Martins

介绍

循环曲目是用于电子游戏音乐制作中的音波内容。它可以用于许多不同情境下，其使用可以追溯到电子游戏行业起源时期。即便在今天，它也为人所熟知，非游戏玩家都知道电子游戏的音乐是“重复性的音乐小片段”。但是，游戏的技术、美学和用户预期都发生了变化，这迫使开发者必须重新思考这项技术的使用，使之更适合现代游戏制作环境。

本文有3个目标。第1是讲述循环曲目的历史以及随后如此流行和有效的缘由。第2是阐述游戏中音乐执行的相关挑战和循环带来的影响。第3是介绍执行游戏音乐的新方法，避免明显增加预算或开发时间。

如果你已经对循环的历史很熟悉，希望能够对其运用了解更多，可以直接跳到这篇文章的最后一部分——“执行音乐的有效方法”。否则，你可以从以下段落开始阅读。

何为循环曲目？

在电子游戏背景下，它指的是开端和结尾无缝连接的音乐。通过这种方法，作曲人员努力不让听众识别出音乐的起点和终点。这种曲目可以无限重复循环，听起来好像比实际情况要长得多。

使用循环曲目主要有两个原因，包括美学和技术层面，二者是紧密相连的。要更好地理解这些原因，我们需要回溯历史，看看在行业早期阶段游戏是如何制作完成的。

以往电子游戏中的音乐循环

在行业历史上，开发者在游戏与媒介的兼容上总是会遇到问题。存储音乐、音效、图像和其他数据的可用空间是有限的。数据优化做得越好，游戏的运行就越快，需要存储的数据量就越少。在某些情况下，优化是游戏制作的必要需求。在上世纪80年代中期，当主机市场开始流行时，磁盘空间与今天的标准相比相去甚远。当时，为保证游戏可以运行，需要将游戏做得很小。

文件大小的技术限制与电子游戏中最重要的美学功能——互动行为发生冲突。在游戏中，很难确切知道玩家会在某个阶段中花费多少时间，因为进入下个阶段的时间完全取决于玩家。从理论上来说，玩家可以在某个阶段待上数小时的时间，毫无进展。

技术和美学这两个原因给游戏音乐作曲者带来了巨大的挑战。他们需要创造在磁盘上占据空间很小的音乐，同时还要保证音乐的长度灵活多变。取决于玩家与游戏互动的结果，相同的音乐应当既可以播放1分钟，也可以播放数个小时。

这也正是循环曲目被广泛采用的原因所在。文件所占空间足够小，可以存放在有限的磁盘空间内，同时不断“扩展”以符合多数互动场景。

但是，循环曲目有很大的不足之处，会影响到它们的制作和对听众产生的效果。

音乐循环的劣势

作曲者面对的挑战之一是制作玩家愿意长期听的循环曲目。无论该曲目多么美妙，一遍遍的重复也会让它变得乏味。做个简单的实验便可以验证这点：尝试听4遍你最喜欢的音乐。到了第4遍，你可能就会对音乐产生厌烦感。之前悦耳的旋律现在变得很烦人，歌曲各个阶段能够产生的惊喜也已经消失。最后，循环音乐会产生非期望结果：它让玩家感到反感，而不是吸引玩家。

循环的长度也应当细心考量。即便相同的音乐可以重复数个小时，也不意味着它应当重复这么长时间。歌曲的时长很短，长度往往只有1或2分钟。如果创造的是短歌曲，很难在其中设置足够的元素来保持长时间的趣味性。音乐对时长的依赖很重，作曲者的工作就是制作在长时间播放后依然能够为玩家所接受的音乐。创造对比是实现上述目标的方法之一。如果音乐的某个部分较为紧张，那么另一个部分就较为缓和，通过对比来维持听众长时间的兴趣。循环的内容越短，创造这种对比就越困难，听众就越有可能对音乐产生厌倦感。

对比不是唯一受循环限制影响的技术。作曲者还尝试使用其他多种作曲技术。比如，如果作曲者希望提升听众对旋律的熟悉感，但是不使用之前的那种重复方法，他们或许会采用以不同音调来播放相同的旋律。这种技术能够产生出熟悉感，但同时也增加了新意，因为它不是完全相同的重复。

提升歌曲的音调能够让听众感觉到音乐的紧张感不断增强。但是，在某些点上，歌曲会达到其循环点，回到原本的音调上。当发生这种情况时，歌曲的紧张感就会减少，从而创造出与玩家期望完全相反的感觉。

循环曲目中的内容“成长”是另一种技术折中方法。这包括随着时间推移使用更多的乐器，使音乐听起来更加“壮观”。但是，当音乐通过循环点时，它就变得“空泛”。之所以会产生这种感觉，是因为歌曲起始阶段使用的乐器数量较少。

这些只是使用音乐循环的部分劣势。在行业初期，这些不足之处似乎并没有产生很大的影响。毕竟，游戏现在能够有这种音乐化背景，多亏了当时的循环。这是个伟大的技术和美学成就。

现在，情境有所不同。游戏变得更加高端，几乎每个游戏制作的技术层面都有了显著提升。玩家想要更高质量的内容，开发者需要快速适应才能生存下去。

这些挑战及其与循环曲目的关系将在下文做进一步的分析。

游戏音乐面临的新挑战

无论现代游戏多么高端，音乐的目标依然保持不变：改善玩家的沉浸度。但是，使用循环音乐已经难以实现这个目标。这种技术仍然可以使用，但是需要将其升级才能满足市场的需求。

改良这种技术的原因有很多，这取决于游戏题材、目标用户和每款游戏想要实现的目标。因为每种情况各不相同，本文将只阐述几乎在所有情况中出现的一种挑战。

难以容忍的重复

资深玩家已经对游戏音乐已经养成了一定的期望，而且能够快速识别循环点。他们不会接受通过循环来创造出的音乐扩展“幻觉”。这种技术在8位和16位机时代能够愉悦玩家，但现在带来的却是厌恶。

现在，甚至连游戏经验较少的玩家也能识别出音乐的重复。或许并非所有人都能够准确指出音乐循环点，但是他们知道音乐是不断重复播放。最后，结果与资深玩家是相同的，音乐产生的是与预期相反的效果。

除此之外，大量廉价的数字音乐录制设备已经改变了我们消费音乐的方法。玩家（游戏邦注：包括音乐消费者）可以获取到大量的音乐内容。许多人养成了每天听数个小时音乐的习惯，这使得他们对音乐质量的需求更高。当他们玩带有重复性音乐内容的游戏时，他们往往会忽视游戏中的音乐，比如将其关闭或调低音量。

许多现代游戏还提供了用存储在设备上的音乐替换游戏音乐的选项。所以，如果音乐可以替换的话，玩家就没有理由要持续听重复性的音乐。

应当注意的是，这些结论都是基于对玩家行为的观察和与游戏行业从业人员的非正式交谈而得出的。本文的目标不是要验证这些事实的科学性，而是要讨论这个市场面临的挑战并为制作游戏的职业人士提供指导意见和灵感。

正如之前提到的那样，本文并非劝说开发者放弃使用音乐循环。在几乎所有的现代游戏中，这项技术依然至关重要，而且也成就了许多绝妙的产品，这些产品以类似以往的方法来使用循环技术。这些分析的目标是让游戏制作者明白为电子游戏创造音乐所面临的挑战以及在某些情境下使用循环可能产生的影响。最后，是否使用循环以及使用的方法等艺术决定必须与产品、目标用户、预算和预想目标保持一致。

行业的响应

AAA游戏（游戏邦注：高制作价值的游戏）制作人意识到行业背景已发生改变，所以革新了游戏音乐的制作方法。在某些游戏中，制作者采用的解决方案是制作更多音乐，从而使内容显得更为多样化。从理论上来说，更多的音乐有助于减少持续性重复带来的影响。

但是，制作更多音乐并非适用于行业内所有人的解决方案。许多独立和小型工作室需要控制游戏制作成本才能生存下去。通常情况下，对这些公司来说，他们的可用成本根本无法满足现代玩家的音乐需求。这些公司采用了以往的低成本解决方案，制作持续播放的短循环音乐。这种方法很经济，但是并非总是有效。

执行音乐的有效方法

要制作使听觉疲劳达到最小化的音乐循环，应当首先评估项目的需求。尝试弄清楚玩家在游戏的每个阶段或关卡中的平均逗留时间。我们在此将这段时间被称为“游戏玩法时间”。因为游戏的非线性本质，得知确切的游戏玩法时间是不可能的，但是根据游戏计划和分析测试结果可以得出估算值。

为避免过度音乐循环，音乐的长度应当长于或等于游戏玩法时间。在这种理想情境下，玩家就只会听到一遍音乐。但是，在低预算项目中很难实现这个目标。如果音乐长度为游戏玩法时间的一般，那么它会重复播放两次，这是可以忍受的，多数玩家不会感到厌烦。但是，如果音乐重复3到5遍，那么重复次数就过多了，就会让玩家感到厌烦。最糟糕的情况是，音乐在游戏玩法时间内重复的次数超过5次。

以下表格显示循环重复次数和对多数玩家产生结果间的关系。

如果游戏中的音乐产生情境D中的结果，那么最佳的解决方案是制作更多的音乐内容，努力向情境A靠近。

但是，如果你因为预算或时间方面的限制无法制作更多的音乐内容，那么还有些其他的解决方案。即便是AAA游戏，也可以使用这些技术作为最小化项目成本的策略。

解决方案1：倒序播放歌曲

描述：将歌曲分为不同部分。在流行音乐中，这些部分往往被称为A、B、桥段和副歌。通过些许调整，可以改变这些部分的播放顺序，产生略有不同的新歌曲。音乐分成的部分越多，组合的变化可能性就越大。

优势：在不断的游戏玩法时间中，音乐的开端不会完全相同。这可以消除玩家在开始听到音乐那一刻产生的重复感。当游戏在不同阶段使用相同的音乐时，这种方法特别有用。

劣势：当歌曲完成循环时，玩家就会意识到游戏将重复播放相同的歌曲。某些经验丰富的玩家甚至能够在循环完成前察觉到音乐各部分的播放顺序。

执行建议：作曲者需要导出不同版本的歌曲，将各部分放在不同的位置上。作曲者还可以分别导出歌曲各个部分，然后在游戏引擎中即时拼装。

解决方案2：去除旋律

描述：旋律是音乐中最容易被人记住的元素。如果你现在回想任何一首音乐，你可能想起的都是它的主旋律。旋律是很强大的音波元素，如果使用恰当的话，能够让玩家更容易记住你的游戏。但是旋律也有不足之处。如果它们重复的次数过多，就会让玩家感到厌烦。

优势：当去除旋律时，就可以增加循环的重复次数，同时不会对玩家的沉浸感产生影响。

劣势：如果旋律被去除，音乐就会失去其影响力，也就不容易被玩家记住。

执行建议：让作曲者导出两个版本的歌曲，一个带有旋律，一个没有旋律。然后交替播放这两个歌曲，努力找出旋律版本和无旋律版本这两者重复的平衡点。你还可以去除播放旋律的音轨，假如你的游戏引擎带有该功能的话。

《塞尔达传输：天空之剑》的首个地下城Skyview Temple使用的就是这种技术。当Link位于主房间时，播放的是带有旋律的音乐。当他进入较小房间时，播放的是没有主旋律的音乐。

解决方案3：关闭音乐

描述：如果使用歌曲重复，你可以在重复次数逼近之前所述情境D时将音乐关闭。

优势：没有音乐就不会让玩家产生听觉疲劳。

劣势：在游戏长时间保持安静后，音乐的忽然再次引入显得很不恰当。

执行建议：将循环播放3次（游戏邦注：即接近情境C）。在第3次重复后，让音乐逐渐淡出。在一段时间内保持游戏在无声状态下运行，然后再次加入音乐。你也可以保持游戏的无声状态，直至下个关卡或场景。

《光晕》使用了这种解决方案。当玩家在单个关卡中花费的时间过长时，游戏配乐就会消失。

解决方案4：随机播放列表

描述：这种解决方案是指以随机的顺序来播放不同歌曲，类似于激活随机播放选项的音乐播放器。

优势：玩家在游戏玩法时间内可以享受到多样化的音乐内容。此外，可以根据项目的主题制作合适的音乐。这样做的结果比简单地用多音乐播放列表来替代游戏音乐更好。

劣势：在某些情况下，音乐内容会开始重复。

执行建议：以随机顺序播放歌曲，但是不要连续两次播放同一首歌曲。

解决方案5：可扩展的尾声

描述：这是个可以添加到音乐文件末尾的短循环。这个循环重复数次之后，可以再播放完整的歌曲。

优势：效果类似于解决方案3，但是更加微妙。当你在音乐末尾制作循环时，你可以缓和玩家的听觉疲劳，使其为下次音乐循环做好准备。

劣势：如果使用过度的话，和其他音乐循环一样，可扩展尾声也会让人厌烦。

执行建议：让作曲者制作短循环（游戏邦注：30秒即可），使用与预设连接音乐相同的BPM和敲击元素。这个文件也应当足够灵活，可以连接至歌曲的起始部分。

结论

要使游戏的音乐更为有趣，尝试组合使用这些解决方案。你可以用带有可扩展尾声的歌曲（解决方案5）来制作随机列表（解决方案4）。你还可以设置带有可扩展尾声的歌曲（解决方案5）播放一段时间后去除旋律重复播放（解决方案2）、完全静默（解决方案3）或者调整音乐各部分播放次序（解决方案1）。从根本上来说，任何解决方案的组合都是可行的，它们都有着类似的结果：扩展游戏的现有音乐，在制作成本没有显著提升的前提下维持其质量。

篇目2，《半条命》系列中所使用的音乐设计方法

作者：Kyle Johnson

与Valve的大多数游戏一样，《半条命》系列在许多设计领域也备受瞩目。除了跨维度的外星人，疯狂的边缘科学以及沉默的主角Gordon Freeman如蓝博一般的全新再生能力外，这系列游戏还尽量想表现得更接地气。其物理机制以及整体的世界“感”都是受到Source引擎的支持。最初为《半条命2》而创造的这一引擎的一大设计目标便是去创造游戏世界中准确的物理性质并围绕着它们去创造各种核心游戏玩法。即使在今天Source仍具有很强大的作用，并且其物理引擎也很少被超越。

我发现《半条命》系列在音乐设计方面采取了较为特别的方法，因为它们相对都较为简单。这些音乐会贯穿出现在整款游戏中，这不仅能够不断提醒玩家该系列所强调的现实主义理念，同时也让鲜少出现的音乐能够在某些特殊时刻调动玩家的情绪。许多编曲都能够有效地与故事主题相契合；即表现出玩家想要阻挡外星人入侵地球的决心。同时游戏中反乌托邦的背景也拥有自己的音乐，这些音乐便是由一些阴暗且极具哥特式的电子元素所构成，并且也毫不逊色于那些强调希望与胜利感的音乐。这些音乐都能够在游戏世界中一些关键时刻强化玩家的情感共鸣并在每个时刻过度中有效地改变游戏玩法的节奏与风格。

让我们以《半条命2》第一章节的配乐为例。在一个开放的空间对抗武装直升机后，关卡设计会变得更有限；因为廊道的一些小迷宫以及各种小房间将会限制玩家移动的空间，从而导致他们无处躲藏。这里将会出现一大批敌人，玩家如果想要继续生存下去就必须经历一场恶战。而游戏则通过提高音乐的声音让玩家能够了解即将发生的事态的节奏；充满力量的敲击乐能够提高玩家的警觉性并暗示他们要想活下去就需要快速做出移动。这不仅是一个能够提供适当的游戏玩法反馈的游戏机制，同时还拥有各种娱乐价值且让玩家在当下觉得自己很厉害。通过使用这种技巧，游戏音乐能够为作为主角的玩家营造出一种简单但却让人兴奋且紧张的行动场景。

在完成必要的奔跑与射击后，音乐将慢慢回到“现实感”中。游戏世界也将再次安静下来；这时候，那种需要快速做出思考的超现实且快节奏的时刻已经完全消失了，你将重新回去探索游戏关卡。而除了音乐效果的减弱外，游戏世界并未发生任何改变。在整个《半条命》系列游戏中会多次出现这种由音乐触发的选择，并且这也能够用于传达战斗之外的各种理念与有趣时刻。有时候音乐还能够呈现出一个全新领域的新基调，这通常都伴随着一些全新的视觉效果。有时候与遥远的目的地或角色的外观等能够吸引注意的视觉效果相结合是非常重要的。

这一高效的设计技巧扮演着各种各样的角色，其在游戏中的科学价值也是不容小觑的。即使没有传统的音乐去传达现实感，种种的音乐暗示也能够做到这些。甚至在一些未突出任何分数奖励的漫长关卡之后，音乐的出现也会让人觉得很自然，就好像下意识会出现的旋律一样。并且这些音乐不会破坏玩家的沉浸感或转移他们的注意力。它们的设置一点都不唐突，反而能够推动玩家进一步去“感受”游戏世界。

我们需要考虑在真正游戏开始前的音频设计以及它的重要性。主菜单通常都未包含音乐，相反地它只是依赖于一些声音设计去传达屏幕上会出现的各种关卡。不管是环境效果，舒服的天气，怪异的音乐，火堆的爆裂声，还是遥远的外星科技所传来的嗡嗡声。在主菜单中，这些元素都会开始创造一些帮助玩家感知他们即将进入的世界的声波感；即这是一个充满弱势但却嚣张跋扈的外星人的安静且濒临死亡的星球。所以未在这里添加音乐能够更有效地传达其它编曲传达不出的氛围。

显然Valve清楚巧妙的音频设计的威力。我们可以从该公司的每一款游戏的音乐元素中辨认出他们。就像好几十年来，曾经参与过最初《半条命》的声音设计一直是这些开发者所拥有的特点。即这些来自他们第一款游戏的元素也成为了我们在之后他们的每一款游戏中识别出他们的线索。也许一些视觉效果发生了改变，但是音乐本身却从未改变。我也从未厌倦这些音乐。

我想以我最喜欢的《半条命》系列中最喜欢的音乐《Triage at Dawn》作为总结。这首音乐是出现在《半条命2》中一个特别恐怖的场景后；即玩家独自待在Ravenholm的一座废弃矿山一个晚上。不久之后就日出了，玩家将能够在一个相对安全的地方见到那些熟悉的面孔，并暂时得到放松。这时候便响起了相对平缓且温和的音乐，并让玩家能够静静回想刚刚经历的可怕场景。这同时也让玩家能够了解现在的角色是以怎样的状态站在自己面前。他们可能从未想过会遇见你，特别是在你所选择的走向他们的那条路上。然而结果却是，你成功地做到了其他人所做不到的事。

我发现这种音乐设计和执行方法非常吸引人。这是只有游戏互动性能够提供的内容。这让游戏世界更有现实感，即使音乐会时不时出现而让人觉得“不现实”的时刻。Gordon Freeman并未戴着耳机。他并不会在战斗中控制声音的大小。他也不会匆忙从MP3中选择适合当下的音乐。《半条命》中的音乐是唯一不属于游戏世界实体部分的内容，但是它却能够有效强化世界的现实感并突显任何危险时刻。

篇目3，精巧的音乐和音效设计能够提升游戏体验

作者：Michael Brown

游戏会控制我们。无论你是否赞同这种看法，每当你打开主机的时候都会受到控制。当我开始用iPad玩游戏《Pulse》的时候，我坐在船上听着音乐并根据节奏来点击那些小点，那时我极为关注游戏的状况及其能够对我产生影响的音轨。我打开游戏后就会觉得音乐影响着每个关卡的基调，我的情绪也会受到控制。

Cipher Prime Studios（游戏邦注：这家开发商位于美国费城）程序员和音频设计师Dain Saint表示，这是一种行业惯例。他说道：“你经常会看到AAA游戏的开发者用音乐来让玩家明白正在发生什么事情。比如，好莱坞电影人可能会有‘这是个悲伤的场景，配上段悲伤的音乐’之类的做法。他们在使用的是背景情绪控制。因为我们做的是音乐游戏，所以在《Pulse》和其他游戏中，我们就尝试将情感链接提到前景处，而不是将其作为背景音乐。”

因为玩家与游戏间的关系很紧密，所以这种做法能够取得成效。Saint说道：“《Pulse》中可供发挥的设计空间很少，所以我们尽量清除玩家与音乐间产生联系的障碍。”

据Cipher Prime联合创始人及首席执行官Will Stallwood所述，iPad游戏《Pulse》是款简单的音乐游戏，其设计目标是成为互动音乐集。

他说道：“你进入游戏的那一刻就要开始学习。我们所有的游戏中都没有教程。当你首次打开游戏时，会产生一个问题。这个问题就是‘我要如何开始玩游戏呢？’。在你真正开始玩游戏之前，你已经学到了基本机制，也就是你会去触碰那些环状物。甚至你在进入游戏主菜单之前，游戏已经在教你怎么玩。”

Saint说道：“我们对游戏做了许多测试。我们将游戏带到GDC大会和费城各地，甚至将其带到酒吧中，让某些喝醉的人来学习如何玩这款游戏。我们认为只要有人无法弄明白游戏玩法，游戏中就要添加些注解。但最终的测试结果是，即便连醉酒的人都会玩这款游戏，对我们来说这是个巨大的成功。我们可以做出凭直觉就可以掌握的产品来。”

《Pulse》的音乐与玩家交流每个关卡的音调。游戏极少依赖视觉效果，Cipher Prime的开发者让音乐成为每个关卡的中心元素和气氛来源。

Saint解释道：“每个音轨都传达着不同的感觉和情感。而且我觉得游戏在这方面做得确实很好。”

《Pulse》的关卡和辅助音频设计师Kerry Gilbert分享了他对游戏音乐功效的看法：“音乐带有指导作用，让玩家经历一段情感旅程。你听着这些歌曲，每首歌曲都有自己独特的感觉，歌曲引导情感起伏。音乐节奏时而紧张时而缓慢，最终用《Cinder》作为结尾。从某种程度上来说，我感觉音乐带来的感觉流畅自然。”

音效和音乐两者都能够控制产生不同的情感。但这些层面除了可以用来引导玩家之外，它们还能够用于在游戏中营造气氛和基调。尽管与《Pulse》大不相同，但Visceral Games的最新产品《死亡空间2》也利用气氛和音调来为玩家营造出非同寻常的环境氛围。

《死亡空间2》之所以会令人感到如此恐惧，部分原因在于游戏使用快节奏管弦乐来增加玩家的紧张感。这便是Visceral的音效制作人Andrew Boyd及其团队努力实现的目标。

Boyd说道：“我觉得音乐对《死亡空间》来说非常重要。尽管我认为它对所有游戏都很重要，但音乐在《死亡空间》中是个关键元素。我们对角色Isaac能够让人产生的心理作用很感兴趣，我们想让玩家获得游戏中的真实体验。但是，玩家玩游戏时是坐在沙发上，而并非真正行走在某些荒废的过道上。我们要如何让你产生真实的感觉呢？音乐可以在不知不觉中实现这种效果，而且如果你做得够好，玩家根本不会对此有所察觉。我们在《死亡空间》中用音乐来营造孤独和恐惧感，我们有大量技术来实现。我们想让玩家有局促不安的感觉。但如果游戏产生的总是这种感觉，久而久之玩家就会觉得枯燥，因而我们需要调节你们的体验。《死亡空间》确实能够让人产生阴暗的感觉，但这正是我们的部分目标。”

玩家还经常忽略的一个层面是，与气氛无缝连接的音效。它们是每款游戏的基础成分，多数玩家甚至都没有注意到它们，这是很自然的情况。但如果游戏音效消失，游戏的效果便大不相同。

Boyd声称：“《死亡空间》游戏中有滚动条，你可以分别调整音效和音乐音量大小。关闭音乐然后把游戏玩通关也是个很有趣的体验。反之亦然，即关掉音效，只在播放音乐的前提下玩游戏。你会马上发现游戏的感染力下降许多。也就是说，音效和音乐是相辅相成的关系。缺失其中之一不会完全失去游戏体验，但效果会大大下降。”

在制作《死亡空间2》时，Boyd及其团队确保了这两个层面间的界线变得更为模糊。他还强调了如何紧密结合音乐和音效：“在《死亡空间》中，二者紧密配合。有时候，你根本分不清自己听到的到底是音乐还是音效。游戏世界中许多环境音效都有着与之相对应的声调元素。它已经完全成为影响用户心理的部分内容。通常音乐都会先逐渐减小声音直至完全消失，我们也采用了这种效果。有时候能够营造出最可怕气氛的恰恰是无声的环境。”

Cipher Prime的开发团队也在《Pulse》中运用无声来营造情感氛围。但其目标不是让玩家感到恐惧，而是间或用无声让玩家有喘息的机会。Dain Saint解释道：“我觉得游戏对音效的运用与其他媒介并无差别。《Pulse》的菜单处并非无声，菜单处的音乐好似管弦乐队正在调音，它让玩家为游戏做好准备。当你选择一首歌曲后，会暂时无声一段时间。当歌曲结束后，游戏又会有一段无声的时间。我们在游戏中运用无声来提供现场演奏的真实感。”

Kerry Gilbert说道：“这些无声就类似于暴风雨前的寂静。在幕布拉开之前，让玩家为接下来的演奏做好准备。”

但是在《死亡空间》中，无声却是个有趣的游戏可玩性元素，几乎经常发生改变。

Boyd说道：“无声部分或许并不独特，但无疑是《死亡空间》中的标志性要素。这是种非同寻常的音效。无声来临的那一刻，你会感到大为惊奇。所有的音效和音乐均已远去，剩下的只有你的心跳和喘息声。我觉得这么设计的游戏应该不多。”

每款游戏的音频设计都各不相同，其中的对象和氛围都不同，而且每个团队对于游戏要营造的效果都有着不同的想法。

Dain Saint回忆道：“去年我前往GDC大会参加讨论会，与众多音频设计师交谈过。有些人表示，玩家会因为游戏音乐设计得很差而关掉音乐。但我觉得其中的原因并不是游戏音乐很差，而是因为当你在玩《荒野大镖客》之类的游戏时，每次走进城镇听到的都是同一首音乐在不断循环，这势必让玩家最终感到厌倦。你必须将音乐设计得更为巧妙，这样人们就不会把它们关掉了。你必须做得更精明些，你需要找出让游戏动态改变、产生和融合音乐的方法，尽全力避免让玩家发现音乐播放的规律，这样玩家就不会有‘音乐又开始循环了，这首歌曲又重新播放了。’之类的想法。如果你能够做到这一点，那么同样的音乐便能够产生更好的效果。音频设计必须更为精妙些。”

篇目4，Peter Drescher解说手机游戏音频制作过程

游戏邦注：本文原作者是Peter Drescher，现任Danger, Inc音效设计师（Danger, Inc是手机设备T-Mobile Sidekick的制造商），很早之前他曾经在街头弹奏钢琴曲卖艺，但是在15年前，这种生活发生了转变。从那时起他开始为多媒体制作音频，并逐渐成为制作小型精巧音频文件的行家。

刚开始我是为《After Dark》的屏幕保护程序制作音乐。后来也为General Magic设备制作音乐邮票以及56K调制解调器的网络音频。而最近，我开始为手机设备制作铃声和游戏音频了。这也正是我将在本文提到的内容。

如今我们提到的“移动设备”指的是手机或者“智能”手机，而不是PSP或者掌上游戏机。在这种情况下，移动设备被定义为一种带有收音机，并能够通过移动网络传播或接收声音和数据的设备。这种设备具有更复杂的操作系统，例如诺基亚和摩托罗拉手机，或者Treo（游戏邦注：美国Palm公司生产的智能手机系列）和Sidekick等设备，因为我们很关心基于不同移动设备操作系统所制作出来的交互式游戏音效。

操作点

当我们在为游戏制作音效和背景音乐时，我们同时也在加强并完善游戏设置，为用户创造有趣，令人兴奋的音频体验而努力。最后我们还必须避免那些让玩家感到烦恼，愤怒，或者不快的音乐出现在游戏中。

玩家并不喜欢那些反复播放的音乐。

玩家并不喜欢冗长的音乐。

玩家并不喜欢反复播放同一个音乐。

如果能够发现玩家的这些问题，你便能够明白如何去避免这些问题。

但是不幸的是，当你的所有音频制作只能够限制在100K储存空间时，上述几种问题将不可避免会出现在你所制作的音频中，这种资源匮乏的情况与当今手机市场中的某些情况类似。假设CD音频播放1秒钟需要耗费86K的话，这时如果你希望游戏音效能为你带来更多的利益，你就必须使用一些特别的技巧。

你必须尽可能地采取一些有效的手段。你希望能够尽可能地压缩音频中的每一个字节，以达到最合理的使用。重复播放是大忌，最大压缩很有益，创造性地使用有限资源则是有效动力。这些标语如果用在音频制作中，便意味着你必须应用各种方法制作出低分辨率且高压缩的声音样本。这种情况如果出现在音乐创作中，就会涉及音乐设备数字接口(MIDI)的概念。下面，我将为你们展现如何使用较小的文件制作出有趣，交互性强且非重复的手机游戏音频。但是如果你想要让这些小块的数据音频变得更好听，就需要多费些脑子了。以下是我们采取的做法。

《Cheese Racer》是一款基于《迷魂车》（Rally X）而开发的游戏，游戏通过运用各种技巧在狭小的储存空间中制造出了各种声音和音乐，包括：

MIDI文件中静音和非静音多重音轨所产生的不同混音。

以不同的音调演奏同一个音乐样本使其产生多种变体。

通过调高或调低音调技巧节省储存空间。

在这款游戏中，播放工具是嵌在通用MIDI的声音库中，同时也包含有一些RMF文件中的特定样本文件。

首先我们来看看原声音乐。图2是游戏中MIDI序列的截图，为我们呈现出了完整的音轨布局。因为这款游戏主要是针对Hiptop这款移动设备而设计，该设备操作系统使用了Beatnik音频引擎（BAE），所以我们可以利用RMF文件创作游戏的原声音乐。也就是说，我们可以从通用MIDI声音库的工具，或者专为该款游戏定制的软件工具看到上图的MIDI序列。

例子：位于前列的两个打击乐音轨样本：

打击乐1（56K MP3）

打击乐2（68K MP3）

然后是包括低音，旋律和和弦的音轨：

低音（92K MP3）

旋律（92K MP3）

和弦（88K MP3）

在第一阶段的核心部分，我们将定义十种不同的音轨组合，包括打击乐+低音，打击乐+低音+旋律，低音+旋律+和铉等等。你可以点击图3的影片剪辑进行试听。

因为每次循环播放音乐的时间是40秒，所以在不同的音轨组合中，每个阶段播放6分多钟不同的音乐组合。当然了，并不是每次播放音乐都会持续40秒。每一次游戏中的音乐组合播放发生变化时，都是由游戏设置而决定，每一首音乐都不会按照同一种方法播放两次，因为这么做才能够保证游戏音乐的多样性并减少玩家的“听觉疲劳”。

事实上，通过使用与第一阶段相同的节奏和打击乐音轨，两种以上的不同音轨还能够播放出更多不同类型的音乐。因此在整个游戏过程中，通过使用68K的压缩音乐样本和MIDI数据，玩家便能听到20多分钟各种音乐混合的多样游戏原声乐。此时你还需注意在两种不同音乐转换期间或者游戏升级期间，应该使用缓冲器让音乐进行缓冲，以听到完整流畅的音乐播放。

是的，你总是想尽可能地听到各种不同的声音，而不想让同一种声音反复“污染”耳朵。虽然《Cheese Racer》这款游戏中只有一种“喇叭”音效，但是我们通过转换音乐播放的频率，使得玩家能在每次捡起乳酪时能够听到不一样的音调（即使都是同样的喇叭声）。

因为我们会在游戏设置中随机调整音调，所以玩家不会在游戏过程中听到任何重复的音乐：

游戏中的声音能够帮助掩饰不同音乐的转换过程，使玩家的音频体验更加顺畅。

另外一种节省储存空间的方法即“调高或调低音调”技巧。首先你必须把原始的高分辨率音效调高成一个八度音阶，并将这个音阶对分。然后把它转变成一个低分辨率的压缩格式，如下：

猫叫，八度音阶以上（12K MP3）

发动汽车，八度音阶以上（16K MP3）

随之降低音阶：

猫叫，八度音阶一下（20K MP3）

发动汽车，八度音阶以下（24K MP3）

尽管游戏中的声音可能会听起来不是很连贯，但是为了使音乐更逼真，你必须尽可能地把原有的音乐文件对半压缩。显然的，如果你的音调越高，游戏中的音乐不连贯性就会越明显，但是在一些特别的工具中却不会出现这种问题，例如手机设备中的小型扬声器就能够很好地播放出这种音乐。

真正的小型扬声器的声音设计

Duke Ellington（游戏邦注：著名的作曲家）曾经说过：“我是为了所有演奏者而谱曲”。换句话说，你之所以会谱写一首喇叭乐曲，是因为你知道这首曲子用喇叭演奏出来将会很动听。所以，当你想为手机游戏创造音频时，你也必须针对你所创作的音频播放工具——拇指般大小的手机扬声器来制作音乐。

首先你必须先排除低音效果，因为你所制作的音频是针对于游戏而言，而且没有一个玩家能够忍受游戏中出现任何低沉无力的音乐。如果能够使用打击类声音更好了，因为鼓声通常都有振奋人心的效果，但是也要注意不要使用过度。

音效亦如此。当你在设计汽车碰撞的音效时，一定要尽可能地让这种声音听起来够澎湃。通过使用250 Hz的高通滤波器或者添加一个3kHz的碰撞音效将能够提高扬声器播放出的音效，并使玩家能够真实感受到汽车碰撞时的爆裂声。

你也许会想尽可能地利用波线1制作游戏中的所有声音（如上图）。但是波线1只是Waves的一个压缩插件，用于降低最高音频并提高整个音乐文件的音量。这种插件主要是用于最大限度地补充数据范围，就像以上右图所示。

这个插件有两个优点。首先通过使用这个插件，你能通过扬声器更大声且更清晰地播放游戏声音。其次这个插件还能尽可能地压缩音频样本，以帮助你能在最小的储存空间中播放最优质的音乐。如以上左图便是把高分辨率和CD品质的音效降低成11kHz，IMA 4:1的压缩文件的展示，这种模式下出现的音乐效果将会和静电干扰的效果一样。

但是这并不代表不能在手机平台上制作出好音乐，而是你必须针对扬声器，这个手机游戏音乐播放器而制定相关策略。对于手机音乐来说，旋律是制胜关键。而对于音效来说，元音则是关键。旁白，尖叫声，笑声，打喷嚏声，叹息声，咕噜声，呻吟声等各种各样通过嘴巴发出的声音都能经由手机扬声器发出，而且保真度也是相当有保证的。以下是一些典型的例子。

《Bob》这款游戏通过使用交互式音频技巧为玩家创造出了多种多样的游戏音乐。在游戏中，随着玩家游戏的进行，游戏中的不同音乐会频繁发生转换，那些频繁播放的弹跳音效完全取决于游戏中的“精灵”（游戏角色）的下降速度，而“Bob”，这个作为游戏中声音最大且最活泼的家伙会在每一次升级时发出“Yeah！”的声音，在下降太快时发出“Whoa”并在开始玩游戏时说道“All Right”。如果你们在游戏过程中觉得这些声音听起来很耳熟，那就没错啦，因为Bob的声音就是我发出来的。

注意在这款游戏中不同音乐是如何发生转换的。低音速度很快，并且在结束后会很快插入电子钢琴乐等等。但玩家在进行游戏的过程中，将会发现游戏的每一个阶段都会出现6到7种不同的乐器组合，而当玩家完成游戏时，将会听到一个完整的音乐组合播放。按照这种方法，整个游戏过程中会一直出现不同音乐，游戏最后的奖励也不例外。

如上图，通过使用tile editor在游戏级别图表中安置传输工具，使游戏能够转换不同的音乐效果。图中的每一个黑点都代表一些特殊的游戏内容，包括弹跳，遇见敌人等，特别是“音频Mix #5”更是专门用了细蓝线标示出来（因为这是一款横向卷轴游戏，所以这条蓝线会持续出现在不同的游戏点上）。如果玩家并没有掉进屏幕中间的那两个无底洞，他将能够进入下一个音频区，也就是如图8所示右边的黑点连成的线，随后游戏便会开始播放“音频Mix #6”。

接下来我想谈谈我最喜欢使用的音频制作技巧，也就是 “Secret Yanni”技巧，这种技巧其实很深奥，很难在这里详细说明。关键问题就在于：视频游戏并非电影，并不能同步播放图片，因为玩家总是不能预言什么时候会突然出现音乐等等。但是如果使用了 “Secret Yanni”技巧，你将能够发现音效的神奇之处，在游戏中合理使用音效定能为你的游戏加分不少。

为了节省储存空间，我们在Bob每次捡到“爱心”时都会播放一些MIDI注释。MIDI能够帮助你在手机环境下制作最好的音效，因为这是一种有效且灵活的技巧。但是问题就在于“该在哪里安放这些注释才最合适？”因为我们并不知道什么时候Bob能够得到积分，所以并不知道什么时候得到积分的“祝贺”音效响起才合适。虽然你希望用“Yay！”来配置得分的音效，但如果注释不相符，也许会出现“Ouch！”也不一定，如果这样的话，画面真的就太搞笑了。

解决方法便是，采用调式音乐。也就是你必须在游戏中限制音乐的使用，不要尝试太频繁的音乐变化，也不要连续播放一些奇异的和弦。很多情况下只要保持简单的音乐就好，因为这是播放背景音乐的最好方式。就像在《Bob》中，和弦的主调是C大调中的ii-IV-V-I，确定了主调后我便按照这种模式并按照五声音阶C，D，E，G和A编写得分注释。如果你想让游戏看起来更加灵活，你可以让注释和音乐同步显示或者也可以使用一些多旋律的音乐让游戏整体看起来更顺畅。按照这种方式所做的音效将不会与游戏中的音乐发生冲突，甚至会和谐到与音乐完全融为一体也说不定。

非音乐的游戏音效

如何做才能避免背景与音乐不符的情况？只要不使用音乐便可以。Danger的另外一款游戏《Meme》便是通过一些情绪类声音取代了音乐。在这款游戏的“邪恶实验室”阶段中，正是使用了“调低或调高”音调这一技巧解决了很多难题，如“如何在一个非常小的储存空间里创造出一个低沉可怕的游戏氛围？”一般来讲，游戏氛围总是需要有很大的覆盖面，因为只有这样玩家才不用总是关注到反复回荡着的一些不自然的音效。另外一个问题便是，“如何做才能用小小的手机扬声器播放出《星际迷航》这样壮观的音效？”

而答案便是，你什么都做不了。因为这是不可能的事，你只有另辟渠道。就像你可以制造出一个高声调但却低波动和低变线颤音的声音，如下：

可怕的实验室氛围（16K MP3）

然后你需要制作一个特定的RMF工具，使用这个工具你便能够播放不同的音调。尽可能地降低音量直到声音渐渐听不见，再开始慢慢提高音调。按照这种方法，你能把声音最低降至“嗡嗡声”，让它听起来若隐若现。

对于玩家来说这可以算是一个较为“吵闹”的游戏。游戏中采用的另一个技巧便是在大猩猩扔香蕉袭击机器人时，香蕉飞跃发出的“嘶嘶声”，在这里我们还特别用“声乐”突出了这种特别的音效，而这种音效将能够通过手机的扬声器大声清晰地表现出来。

同时我们也在“机器人工厂”这一阶段尝试了用“不同方法播放同一种声音样本”。即每当一个机器人被制造出来时，这个场景里便会出现一种机器摩擦声的音效。

攻击（12K MP3）

机械（16K MP3）

在游戏设置中，因为手机扬声器太小而不能播放一些设计精巧的音效，只能展现给玩家一些较大且相对粗糙的音效。也许这并不是你第一次为机器人工厂这类型的游戏氛围设计音效，但是因为是针对手机游戏所设计的，所以并不能应用那些多余的额外储存空间。

在这款游戏中我最喜欢的便是大炮的音效，即子弹落下的那个音度：

子弹（8K MP3）

但是子弹下落的频率却是不可预料。所以在游戏中玩家必须灵活移动，并需要作出合理的猜测。看图11。

我之所以能够制造出这种交互式的音效是因为：

我利用了Beatnik技术——音效设计的好工具。

我在这个行业已经打拼多年，所以很了解应该使用那些手段和技巧制作出好音频。

我很了解目标硬件和操作系统，因为我自己就会制作这些硬件和系统。但是如果你是个独立的音频制作者并想要制作大量的手机游戏音效，那么你就该好好动动脑子了。

首先，你需要注意手机操作系统是否支持你访问一些与处理转换音调或静音等情况的API。然后你还必须检查手机的音频子系统能否按照你所设想的情形进行。如果你能够使用Beatnik，那情况便再好不过，反之，你便不得不另辟蹊径了。不同手机的音频能力和音频引擎大不相同，既有最初级的也有最复杂深奥的。

然后你必须判断如何做才能在最小的储存空间里安置最大的音量，同时你还必须考虑到你所制作的游戏音效所处的平台的技术局限问题，包括这个平台支持什么样的文件类型，什么样的分辨率以及什么样的压缩格式等等。

如果你能够制作高分辨率的MP3格式，那你便能按照所有设想放手制作音效；但是如果平台限制你只能制作8k赫兹IMA WAV文件格式，你便不得不考虑使用一些较短，大声且简单的音效。比起一些复杂的“噪音”，这些简单的音效较容易转换。也就是说比起交响乐如此多类型的音乐结合体，单独一款长笛音乐更容易转换。所以针对于手机扬声器而言，最好更侧重于制作一些音量较小的音效，且避免夸张的爆炸音效。

更重要的是你必须清楚有多少储存空间能让你安置这些音乐。大部分情况下如果你想要制作音乐，就必须使用通用MIDI的内部波表（游戏邦注：MIDI的一种合成技术），因为它可以称得上是目前为止最形象的音频效果。而且你最好不要为难自己，尽可能地选择一些简单且基础的音源，如钢琴，喇叭，反冲，陷阱或者弦乐器等，最好不要使用像日本笛或者其它并不知名的音源。

而且因为你并不知道发声仪器在不同的设备中会有怎样的效果，但是不管怎样，像钢琴这类型的音乐总是能展现出最好的音效。而且我想说的是，即使我们认为单独的乐器更有利于音效的展现，但是我们并未限制巴赫，贝多芬或者肖邦等的音乐，如果适合，我们也会好好利用这些大师们的创作。

一切都是来自于过去

说实在的，我今天所提到的任何技巧都不是最新的技巧。我敢保证，任何一个创作灵感或者激进的想法都不可能只是停留在当下的一种设想。事实上，今天为手机游戏创造音频就与我们在80年代为计算机游戏创造音频以及90年代为网络游戏创造音频的情况类似，因为我们也遇到了相同的问题，如资源受限，竞争激烈等，所以我们也在尝试着用当时的解决方法来看待这些问题。

因为我们之前就接触过类似的领域，所以已经有了一定的经验，对于如何制作最适合且最有效的音频格式我们心里都有数了。因为我们知道手机游戏的音频制作需要更广阔的宽带接口，所以我们便计划着将最大限度地进行扩展。

我们也知道所有的数字版权管理（DRM）也都是预先设定好的，所以我们能做的便是按照用户的需求提供他们想要的效果，而不是操纵他们做任何事。

最重要的是，因为我们在过去制造其它音频时也应用了同样的技巧，而且这些技巧不仅对当前的手机音频制作很有帮助，我们还预测它们在未来的相关领域的功效也会非常巨大。换句话说，如果你想要制作一款有趣且高质量的游戏音频，那你最好去雇佣那些有经验的游戏音频制作者们，因为他们拥有广大新手们所不具备的制作技巧。

顺便提一下，这些“经验教训”并不是我所总结的，而是在2004年的Bar-B-Q手机音频项目会议上提出的。

过去是过去，现在才是现在

最后，所有朋友们，我想说的是当今手机产业发展如此迅速，所以我想说，其实我今天所提到的关于手机游戏音频设计的所有内容都是胡扯，因为只要我们知道如何把最新型的设备与早前设备相结合，那便没有什么是不可能做到的。

如今同时带有十亿字节移动储存卡和宽带网络连接的音乐手机已经出现了，这也标志着我之前提到的手机游戏音乐已经完全过时了。

手机游戏并不像Xbox或者PSP上的游戏，因为频带宽度和CPU的使用限制，手机游戏不得不限制于一些小型，有趣且用于消遣的游戏。它们并不是像《战神》这类型能让玩家耗费40个小时沉迷于游戏世界的游戏，反而玩家是把它们当成日常生活中随时可以用于消遣的工具。而且因为技术的限制，且价格也比较便宜，加上它们是用于手机平台而不是特定的游戏平台，手机游戏中的音频分辨率通常都比较低，不论你运用了何种技巧，这都是一个不可改变的事实。

我们必须满足于所有能够得到的东西。就像现在我们所使用的设备都能用于拍照，发邮件，上网，玩游戏，打电话以及听音乐。问问你自己，当你在打游戏消遣时最想听什么音乐？是那些不知名的MIDI音频还是从iTune中上传到手机上的格莱美奖获得者所演唱的歌曲？答案不用说大家也都知道吧！

而且我也是这么认为的。如果玩家在游戏过程中能够滚动游戏音频，选择斯密斯飞船，Greenskeepers，或者纽约爱乐乐团等自己喜欢的乐队歌手的歌曲，那这将是件非常棒的事吧！如今摩托罗拉的一些手机已经嵌入了iTune音乐播放器，同时也逐渐出现了很多音乐手机。但是从我个人来讲，我却仍在使用这台定制的黑色Hiptop，而且我还用布基胶带在Hiptop后面粘贴了iPod第四代播放器（因为我是个乐师，我认为所有的乐师都应该像我这么做）。

商店里可没有出售这台nanoHiptop，而且我这么做也未经Danger或苹果的批准，所以你们最好不要模仿我做这种尝试。然而如果仔细想想，这真的是一个很棒的理念吧，它改变了传统意义上对手机游戏音频的想法，使我们看到一个不一样的音频播放方式。

篇目5，电子游戏音乐如何增加玩家沉浸感

作者：Gina Zdanowicz

音乐是娱乐媒体中的重要组成部分。随着游戏不断发展，游戏音乐越来越强调与游戏画面相结合、营造场景和唤起玩家情绪。游戏音乐应该影响玩法，而玩法也应该影响音乐。玩家的活动影响音乐的交互性和变化，就像音乐影响玩家在游戏过程中的决策一样。这种融合使玩家更加深入地沉浸在游戏体验中。

制作游戏音乐的一大挑战是，在考虑游戏音频引擎的局限性情况下，提供自然的交互体验。

技术如变化节拍、流派、乐器和音符可以给游戏的各个区域营造完美的情绪氛围，刺激玩家产生相应的感受。

分层配乐技术就是在每一层音乐流中使用不同的乐器；这些音乐流不仅会强化音乐本身、契合游戏画面，并且能够与其他音乐流融合，使音乐随着游戏进展发生变化。

渐强的音乐可以暗示玩家危险即将来临。BOSS战需要更激烈的音乐，所以要同时使用若干种乐器，并突出打击乐器。而BOSS被打败后，音乐节拍应该变慢，减少使用的乐器数量，暗示玩家危机已经解除。

《超级马里奥兄弟》利用渐强的节拍暗示玩家时间正在耗竭，刺激玩家产生通关的紧迫感。《死亡空间2》使用环境音响和大量管弦乐来营造一种恐怖的气氛。在游戏中使用少量弦乐四重奏与大量交响乐形成对比，可以体现主角的脆弱。

音乐和画面都必须仔细考虑和紧密结合，以形成连贯的环境。音乐逐渐增强使玩家有时间放松，为下一个重要的紧张时刻做准备，这与游戏的节奏一样重要。

当你想想音乐对游戏的影响，你就会看到它对游戏行业的重要性。音乐不再是游戏的背景。有些音乐游戏（游戏邦注：如《摇滚乐队》和《吉他英雄》）便颠覆了标准的玩法，把音乐变成游戏。

在游戏中越来越流行的一种技术是剧情音乐。剧情音乐是指，发源于游戏世界的音乐。如果游戏配乐能把叙事音乐结合到游戏世界中，总是能取得不错的效果。但在现实世界中，当你漫步于公园或海难时，你不会听到任何音乐，除非你自己戴着耳机。剧情音乐尽管来源于游戏世界的某个物品，但仍然可以营造环境氛围。

我们来看看使用了剧情音乐的游戏是如何增加玩家在游戏世界中的沉浸感。

《辐射3》充分利用了剧情音乐和非剧情音乐。除了游戏角色的手腕上安装的一种叫作“Pip-boy 3000”的小计算机，游戏世界中到处是播放音乐和其他无线电台节目的无线广播。当玩家打开角色的“Pip-boy 3000”时，他们就必须小心无线信号会使NPC发现角色的所在。当广播功能被打开，游戏世界就充满非剧情背景音乐。

《生化奇兵》也综合使用了剧情音乐和非剧情音乐，以及无音乐来营造氛围。在游戏的开头部分，玩家从失事的飞机中逃到小岩石岛的灯塔。这个场景中没有音乐，使玩家产生了一种在绝望中求生的感觉。玩家进入灯塔后，音乐开始响起。这股音乐来自楼下，刺激玩家在音乐中走下楼梯，去寻找潜水球中的收音机。在这里，音乐的作用有二：一是发展剧情；二是营造氛围。

当60年代的音乐响起时，这种剧情音乐确实突出了衰败城市的面貌。用于替代管弦背景音乐的剧情音乐，可以从角落传来，也可以被挡在门外。

在《求生之路》中，玩家打开自动唱机会引吸僵尸群的注意。在进攻时，游戏没有使用非剧情音乐，而是继续播放自动唱机的音乐，即使玩家已经看不到自动唱机。

《侠盗猎车手》也是利用剧情音乐的好例子。汽车收音机有不同的频道和音乐，玩家在开车时可以自由选择。毕竟，谁不喜欢一边开车一边听音乐呢？

剧情音乐转换可以用于持续播放剧情音乐。也就是，在游戏中，随着场景变更，一开始作为剧情广播从收音机发出或来自其他声源的音乐会变成非剧情音乐，继续在游戏环境中播放。

在《塞尔达传说：时间之笛》中，Saria的剧情音乐引导玩家进入迷失森林。随着音乐的音量升高，玩家意识到他们正在朝着正确的方向前进。如果玩家走错路，那么音乐的音量就会下降，以提醒玩家调整方向。等到玩家熟悉音乐之后，它就变成场景中的非剧情音乐。

随着游戏发展，游戏音乐也必定会发生变化，更加自然紧密地与视觉和听觉体验联系在一起，从而强化玩家在游戏世界中的沉浸感，吸引着玩家直到他们按下停止键。

篇目1，篇目2，篇目3，篇目4，篇目5（本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao）

篇目1，Rethinking the audio loop in games

Marcelo Martins

Introduction

A looped composition is an intriguing sonic artifact used in the production of music for videogames. It can adapt itself to many different situations, and it has been in use as long as the videogame industry has existed. It is so popular that even today, music for videogames is still remembered by non-gamers as “tiny, repetitive pieces of music.” Nevertheless, the technology and aesthetic of games, along with consumer expectations, have changed, forcing developers to rethink the use of this technique in order to make it relevant in the modern game production environment.

This article has three objectives. The first is to talk about the history of looped compositions and find out why they were so popular and effective back then. The second objective is to identify challenges related to musical implementation in games and the impact caused by loops. The third and final goal is to suggest new ways of implementing music into games, without significantly increasing the budget or time of development.

If you are already familiar with the history of loops, and wish to know more about their application, jump to the last part of this article, “Efficient approaches to musical implementation.” Otherwise, start by reading the next paragraph.

What is a looped composition?

In the context of videogames, it is music in which the beginning and end are seamlessly connected. By doing this, the composer is trying to prevent the listener from identifying where the music starts and ends. This composition can be repeated endlessly, and it sounds like it is much lengthier than it actually is.

There are two main reasons to use looped compositions. The first is aesthetical and the second is technical, and they are closely related to each other. To better understand these reasons, we need to go back in history and remember how games were produced during the industry’s infancy.

The musical loop in yesterday’s videogames

Historically, developers always struggled to fit games into a medium. The available space to store music, sound effects, graphics and other data is finite. The better the optimization of this data, the faster the performance of the game and the lesser the amount of data it requires to be stored. In some cases, optimization is an essential requirement. In the mid-1980s, when the console market started to gain popularity, disk space was incredibly small compared to today’s standards. At that time, games had to be very small in order to be viable.

The technical limitation of the file size enters into conflict with the most important aesthetic feature of video games: interactivity. In a game, it is very difficult to know exactly how long a player spends in a given section, since it’s the player who decides when to advance. Theoretically, one can simply stay put for many hours in a stage without progressing.

These two reasons, technical and aesthetical, created a huge challenge for game music composers. They needed to create music that occupied a minimum of space on disk, and, at the same time, had flexible length. The same music file could be reproduced for one minute or for several hours, depending on the result of the player’s interaction with the game.

That’s why the solution of the looped composition was so well received. The files were small enough to fit in the limited space available for storage, and at the same time, could be “extended” to fit most interaction scenarios.

However, looped compositions have significant drawbacks that affect both their production and the effect they have on the listener.

The disadvantages of looping

One of the challenges the composer faces is making the loop pleasing to the ear for longer periods. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the composition is. After being repeated over and over, it becomes boring. Here’s a simple exercise that proves this: try listening to your favorite music four times. By the fourth repetition, you may not be able to listen to the music at all anymore. The melodies that were once pleasant and pleasing become annoying, and the surprise generated by each new section of the song is gone. In the end, looped music creates an undesired effect: it repels listeners, instead of attracting them.

The length of the loops should also be carefully considered. Even though the same music can be repeated for many hours, it doesn’t mean it should be. The songs are still quite short, usually one or two minutes in length. It is very hard to create short songs that have enough elements within them to be interesting for so long. Music is highly dependent on its duration, and the job of the composer is to make music pleasant over time. One of the ways to do this is to create contrast. If a certain part of the music is tense, the other part can be soft, creating contrast and maintaining the interest of the listener for longer periods of time. The smaller the loop, the more difficult it is to create this contrast and the more likely the listener will grow bored of the music.

Contrast is not the only characteristic affected by the limitations of looping. Several compositional techniques also need to be adapted. For instance, if the composer wishes to enhance the familiarity of a melody without repeating it exactly as before, they may want to play the melody in a different key. This technique creates a feeling of familiarity, but at the same time adds novelty, since it’s not an identical repetition.

Raising the key of a song gives the impression that the music is growing in intensity. But, at some point the song will reach its looping point and return to its original key. When this happens, the song sounds less intense, thus creating the exact opposite feeling desired when the composer gradually raised the key.

Another technique compromised by looped compositions is the “growth” of the arrangements. This consists of using more instruments over time, making the music sound more “grandiose”. However, when the music passes through the looping point, it becomes “empty” and “thin”. This happens because there are fewer instruments playing at the beginning of the song, before the arrangements started to “grow”.

These are just a few examples of the disadvantages of using musical loops. At the beginning of this industry, these weaknesses didn’t seem to have a huge impact. After all, games could now have a musical background, thanks to the loop. This was a great technical and aesthetical achievement.

The situation is different now. Games are getting more sophisticated and almost every technical aspect of game production has improved significantly. Gamers are demanding higher-quality content and developers need to adapt quickly in order to survive.

These challenges and their relationship with looped compositions are going to be further analyzed in the next paragraphs.

New challenges for game music

No matter how sophisticated modern games are, the goal of music still remains the same: promote immersion for the player. Nevertheless, it is hard to achieve this objective using short-length looped musical artifacts that repeat themselves ad infinitum. This wonderful technique is still going to be used, but it needs to be upgraded in order to fulfill the demands of the market.

There are several reasons that justify the revision of this technique, and they vary depending on the game genre, target audience, and the objective each game is aiming to achieve. Since every situation requires a different analysis, this article will focus on one challenge that permeates almost all situations.

The intolerance to repetition

Experienced gamers have developed their musical perception and are perfectly capable of quickly identifying the looping point. They don’t accept the “illusion” of musical extension through loops. The use of this technique, once pleasant in the 8 and 16-bit generation, now causes repulsion instead of immersion.

Even players with less experience are now capable of identifying the musical repetition. Perhaps not all of them will be able to pinpoint the exact location of the looping point, but they know the music is repeating. In the end, the result is similar, and the music becomes undesirable.

Besides that, the wide range of affordable digital music playback devices have changed the way we consume music. Players (and music consumers) have a huge arsenal of music content available in their pockets. Many are accustomed to listening to hours of diverse music throughout the day and this has made them even more demanding. When they play games with repetitive musical content, their tendency is to simply ignore the music by turning it off or lowering the volume.

Many modern games also provide the option to replace the game’s music with the music stored on the device. So there is no good reason for a player to continue listening to repetitive music if it can easily be replaced.

It is important to note that these statements are made based on observations of players behavior, as well as informal conversations with other people working in this industry. The aim of this article is not to be a scientific basis for proof of facts, but a document that discusses the challenges of this market and serves as guidance and inspiration for professionals that produce games.

As previously mentioned, this article is not attempting to discourage the use of the loop. This technique is still crucial in almost every game, and there are many examples of wonderful products (some that are even references for musical production in the industry), which continue to use loops in a way similar to previous generations. The purpose of this analysis is to alert game producers to the challenges of creating music for video games and the impact that the use of the loop may have in some situations. In the end, the artistic decision whether to use the loops or not, as well as the implementation approach, must be aligned with the product, the target audience, the budget and the intended goal.

The response of the industry

Producers of games referred to as “AAA” (games with high production values) are aware of this context change and have updated their approach to the musical production of their games. The solution, in some cases, is to produce more music, thus making the content more diverse. Theoretically, more music would help reduce the undesirable effects of continuous repetition.

However, producing more music is not a viable solution for everyone in the industry. There are a lot of independent and small businesses that need to produce low-budget games in order to survive. Often, the available budget is not adequate to satisfy the musical demands of the modern gamer. Companies are stuck with the low-cost solutions of the past, creating short loops that are played continuously during most of the gameplay experience. This approach is economical, but not always effective.

Efficient approaches to musical implementation

In order to create musical loops that minimize the probability of listening fatigue, it is first necessary to assess the needs of the project. Try to find out how much time, on average, players spend during each session, stage or segment of your game. In this article, this will be referred as Gameplay Time. Given the non-linear nature of the games, it is impossible to know exactly how long players spend in Gameplay Time, but it is crucial to have an estimate based on the game planning and, more importantly, the analysis of test results using various players’ profiles.

To avoid excessive musical repetition, the length of the music should be greater or equal to the Gameplay Time. In this ideal scenario, the player would only listen to original music. However, it is hard to achieve this goal in low-budget projects. If the music length is equal to 50% of the Gameplay Time, it will be repeated twice, which is tolerable and does not bother most gamers. But if the music starts to repeat 3-5 times, it can become too repetitive, repelling the player. The worst case scenario is when the music is repeated more than five times during the Gameplay Time.

The table below shows the relationship between the number of repetitions of the loop and the sensorial results for most players.

If the music in your game results in scenario D, the best solution is to create more musical content and try to approach scenario A.

However, if you can’t produce more musical content, due to budgetary or scheduling constraints, there are some workarounds. It is important to notice that even AAA games are using these techniques as a strategy to minimize the costs of the project. All the solutions cited below are related to the concept of dynamic arrangements (horizontal and vertical).

Solution 1 – Inversion of the parts of the song

Description: Songs are divided into different parts which are presented one after another over time. In popular music, these parts are often called A, B, bridge and chorus. By making some adjustments, it is possible to change the order of the parts, making a slightly different, new version of the song. The more parts the music has, the greater the possibility of combinations.

Advantages: The music doesn’t start exactly the same way during different Gameplay Times. This mitigates the feeling of repetition at the moment the player starts to listen to the music. It is especially useful when the same music is used in different sections.

Disadvantages: Once the song completes its loop cycle, the player realizes that the same song is being reproduced. Depending on the listener’s experience, they may even perceive the order replacement before the completion of the cycle.

Suggestion for implementation: The composer needs to export different versions of the song, with parts in different places. It is also possible to export each part separately and then assemble them in real time within the game engine.

Solution 2 – Mute the melody

Description: The melody is the most memorable element in music. If you think of any music right now, you will probably remember the main melody. Melodies are powerful sonic artifacts that, if used properly, can make your game even more memorable. But melodies have a drawback. If they are repeated too much, they can repel the listener.

Advantages: It is possible to increase the number of loop repetitions when the melody is muted, without harming the player’s immersion.

Disadvantages: If the melody is often excluded, the music can lose its impact and fail to be memorable.

Suggestion for implementation: Ask your composer to export two versions of the song, one with melody and one without. Then play them alternately, trying to carefully find the balance for the repetition of both melodic and non-melodic versions. You can also mute the tracks that play the melody, if your game engine has this feature.

This technique is used in the Skyview Temple, the first dungeon of Zelda: Skyward Sword. When Link is in the main room, a melodic version of the theme is played. When entering smaller rooms, the main melody is muted.

Solution 3 – Implementation of silence

Description: An aggressive version of solution 2. By repeating the song a number of times, you can simply turn it off when the number of repetitions approaches the aforementioned scenario D.

Advantages: As there is no music, the player won’t experience the undesirable effects of listening fatigue.

Disadvantages: If the game is silent for a long time, abrupt reintroduction of the music can be jarring.

Suggestion for implementation: Play the loop 3 times (approaching scenario C). After the third repetition, let the music subtly disappear. Leave the game in silence for a while and repeat the operation. You can also mute the music until the end of the next stage/segment.

This solution was used in Halo. When the player spent too much time in one stage, the music simply disappeared.

Solution 4 – Random playlist

Description: This solution proposes the use of different songs played in random order, similar to a music player with the shuffle option enabled.

Advantages: The player has a greater diversity of music content available during Gameplay Time. Furthermore, the music can be tailor-made to match the theme of the project. The result is better than simply replacing the game’s original music with the playlist.

Disadvantages: At some point, the musical content will start to repeat.

Suggestion for implementation: Play the songs in random order, but don’t repeat the same file twice in a row.

Solution 5 – Expandable end

Description: This is a short loop that can be added at the end of the music file. After a few repetitions of this loop, the full song can be reintroduced.

Advantage: The effect is similar to solution 3, but more subtle. When you create a loop at the end, you can mitigate the effects of listening fatigue and prepare the player for the next musical repetition.

Disadvantages: The expandable end can become annoying if overused, just like any other musical loop.

Suggestion for implementation: Ask your composer to create a short loop (30 seconds is more than enough), using the same BPM and percussive elements of the music it will be connected to. This file should be flexible enough to connect with the beginning of the song.

Conclusion

To make your music production even more interesting, try to combine these solutions. You can create a random list (solution 4) with songs with expandable ends (solution 5). You can also use songs with expandable ends (solution 5) that may repeat without melodies after a while (solution 2) and fall into silence (solution 3), returning with parts reversed (solution 1). Basically, any solution combination can be made and they all have a similar result: the expansion of the existing musical production of your game, maintaining the quality without significant increase to production costs.

篇目2，The Half-Life Approach (to Music Design)

by Kyle Johnson

The Half-Life series, like most Valve titles, is remarkable in many areas of design. Besides the inter-dimensional aliens, crazy fringe-science, and newly acquired regenerative Rambo-like abilities of its mute protagonist, Gordon Freeman, the games have all strived to be as grounded as possible. Chiefly the physical mechanics and general ‘feel’ of the world, powered by the Source engine. When the engine was built, initially for Half-Life 2, one of its primary design goals was to recreate accurate physical properties in the world and subsequently build a lot of the the core-gameplay around them. Truly innovative at the time, Source still feels great to play today and its physics engine has seldom been bettered.

The games in the Half-Life series have a particular approach to music design I’ve always found interesting due to its relative simplicity. Musical playback is intentionally infrequent throughout the games, not only to help assert the idea of realism that the series strives for, but to allow the rare appearance of music to enhance mood by ‘speaking’ to the player dynamically at specific moments. Many of the compositions are moody ambience tracks that are dark in tone in line with the theme of the story; a struggling resistance’s fight to reclaim the earth from an oppressive alien race. The dystopian setting has a soundtrack that is filled with gloomy dread and eerie gothic electronic compositions that rarely deviates to allow for music that briefly conveys hopes and victories to shine through. It enhances intended emotional resonance during key moments in the journey and is deftly capable of entirely changing the pace and style of gameplay from one moment to another.

Take the above track from Half-Life 2: Episode One for example. After a confrontation with a gunship in an open space the level design becomes confined; a mini-labyrinth of corridors and small rooms that constrict player movement leaving nowhere to hide. Once here it’s clear a very large wave of enemies is imminent and some serious ass-kicking will have to be dealt out in order to survive. The game lets the player know the pace of the imminent scenario by simply fading up the track; an energetic percussive-led composition, that aims to increases player-alertness and strongly suggests an increase in pace and movement is required in order to survive. Not only is this a cool gameplay mechanic that provides the appropriate feedback for gameplay, it also has a of great deal of entertainment value and can make you feel like a complete bad-ass in the moment. Via this technique the music has created a brief but exciting and intense action scene out of nowhere and you have the starring role.

After the necessary running and gunning has finished, the music fades away returning the ‘reality’ of the space. The world is silent again; the hyper-real, upbeat moment of quick-thinking has now vanished completely and you’re back to exploring your way through the level. Nothing about the game world has actually changed during the last few moments besides the fading in and out of music (and the piles of dead alien soldiers). This kind of choice musical-triggering happens a lot throughout the series and it’s extremely effective at assisting all kinds of ideas and interesting moments outside of combat too. Sometimes it merely works to establish the tone of a new location, usually accompanied by an area that introduces a new visual aesthetic to the player. Sometimes it’s triggered in collaboration with an attention-grabbing visual of something important like a distant destination or the appearance of a character.

As efficient as this design technique is at playing the various roles, the value of silence is also never under appreciated in the games. The lack of a conventional soundtrack works just as well to serve the reality and sense of place as the musical cues do in aiming to enhance it. Even after prolonged sections of level that feature no score, the appearance of music feels really natural, as if designed to be experienced subliminally. It never breaks immersion or pulls player focus directly on to it. It is wholly unobtrusive and only ever acts an audible extension to the ‘feeling’ of the world.

‘Half-Life 2′ Main Menu (cycle)

The consideration of audio design and how significant it is begins before the actual game even starts. The main menu contains no music and instead relies solely on pieces of sound design to populate whatever instance of level is shown on screen. From environmental effects, gentle weather, and eerie soundscapes, to a small fire crackling, the hum of alien technology in the distance, or the lone squarks of bird (curiously the only animals ever seen in the games). During the main menu these components begin to create an indirect sonic sensibility that carefully codes player perception of the world they are about to enter; a quiet, dying planet, infused with a faint but domineering alien presence. The lack of music here helps sell the atmosphere in a way that any kind of composition never could, it speaks volumes about the world and begins the process of grounding the player within it instantly.

Valve Ident (2004)

It’s clear that Valve understand the power of smart audio design. The company ident at the start of every game is almost entirely recognisable by the music cue that accompanies it. Comprised of a small slice of one of the original Half-Life’s soundtrack, for almost two decades it has been the developers calling card. After all the years they have existed, this simple cue from their first game remains the way in which they choose to identify themselves at the start of every new game. Though the visual aspects of the ident have been slightly updated, the music itself has never changed. It clearly stands for something, and I for one never tire of hearing it. It’s just plain cool.

‘Triage at Dawn’ (Half-Life 2)

I’ll wrap up this entry with one of my favourite pieces of music in the series, ‘Triage at Dawn’. It comes after a particularly distressing horror section of Half-Life 2; surviving a night alone in the abandoned mining town of Ravenholm (we don’t go there). Shortly after emerging into the morning light and meeting with friendly faces in a relatively safe place, a brief chance to relax is granted to the player. During this moment a contemplative and gentle composition begins to play and for the first time allows you to reflect on the hellish ordeal you’ve just been through. It also suggests to you how the characters now standing in front of you perhaps feel about you. They probably never expected to ever see you, especially given the route you’ve taken to reach them. Yet here you are. Alive. Triumphant in having done what no one else can do. A triage at dawn.

I find this sort of approach to music design and implementation fascinating. It’s something that only the interactivity of games can offer. It allows the world to feel realistic even when moments of ‘unreality’ via music punctuate it from time to time. Gordon Freeman isn’t wearing headphones. He isn’t hastily fading the volume in and out during a firefight. He’s not hastily shuffling through MP3s to find appropriate music to accommodate how he’s feeling about things in the moment. The music in Half-Life is the only thing in the game that isn’t physically part of the world yet it manages to enhance the reality of it and give weight to the things that are at stake within it.

篇目3，Puppet Masters: How Game Musicians Manipulate You

Michael Brown

Games control us. Like it or not, we’re being manipulated each time we boot up our consoles. When I started the rhythm game Pulse on my iPad, sitting on my bed, listening to the music and tapping the dots in tune to the rhythm, I was acutely aware of how the game and its soundtrack were affecting me. As I started the game, I couldn’t help but feel as if the music was affecting the tone of each level, and controlling my emotions in turn.

This is a standard industry practice, says Dain Saint, a programmer and audio-designer at Cipher Prime Studios, a developer based out of Philadelphia. “In general, you’ll normally see in AAA titles people using music to try and tell the player exactly what is going on,” he says. “So for example, in a Hollywood movie they’ll say, ‘Ok, this is a sad scene. Bring up the sad music.’ They’re using those kinds of background emotional controls. With Pulse and the rest of our games — since we do music games — we try to bring that emotional connection to the foreground instead of leaving it in the background.”

It’s an effect that works because of close proximity players have to the game, Saint says. “In Pulse, the design is very minimal so we try to take away as many barriers between the player and the music as possible.”

Developed for the iPad, Pulse is a simple music game designed to be an interactive album, according to Will Stallwood, CEO and co-founder of Cipher Prime.

“You’re learning the second you get into the game. We’re all really big fans of teaching here, and on all of our games we don’t have tutorials. So when you first get into the game, you’re presented with a problem. The problem is, ‘How the f*** do I start the game?’” he says.

“Before you even get into the game you’ve already learned the basic mechanic — you have to touch circles. You’re getting taught before you even get into the menu to get into the game.”

“We went through a lot of testing,” says Saint. “We took it to GDC, we took it around Philadelphia, we took it out to bars and actually had quite a few drunk people sit down with Pulse and figure out how to play it. We would take notes and if somebody couldn’t get it, then we would make note. The thing was, that by the end, even drunk people could play it, and for us that was a win. We were able to make something that was that intuitive.”

The music of Pulse communicates the tone of each level to the player. Sparsely relying on visuals, the developers at Cipher Prime are able to let the music become the central character and source of atmosphere in each level.

“With each track we communicate a very different sort of feel; a very different sort of emotion. And I think that it does that really well,” explains Saint.

Kerry Gilbert, level and co-audio designer on Pulse, shares his opinions about the abilities music has in their game: “It sort of guides, for lack of a better term, the emotional journey. You know, you’re going through each song and they each have their own feeling and song takes you up and takes you back down. It speeds you up and then slows you down, and then you finish with a big finale with Cinder and then you’re done. It feels very linear to me, in a way.”

Both sound and music have multiple different properties and uses. Besides using these aspects as a means to educate players, they can also be used to create ambience and tone (or lack thereof) in games. However, in a very different vein than Pulse, Dead Space 2, the latest production from Visceral Games, uses ambience and tone to create a very different sort of atmosphere for the player.

Part of what makes Dead Space 2 so scary is its use of a tense orchestral score to heighten tension. This is exactly what Sound Producer Andrew Boyd, and his team at Visceral were looking to accomplish.

“I think [that music] is pretty important in Dead Space,” remarks Boyd. “I think it’s important in all games, but in Dead Space it’s really a key component. We’re very interested in the psychology of the character — Isaac’s character — and we want to put the player through some of those same kinds of experiences. So, as a player, you’re sitting on your couch, you’re not actually walking down some deserted hallway. How do we make you feel like you are? How do we play with that?

“Music works on this great unconscious level…if you’re doing it right, people don’t recognize what’s happening necessarily. But we use the music in Dead Space to create that sense of loneliness and isolation and dread — and we’ve got a million techniques for doing it.”

“We want to play with a sense of uneasiness. Constant uneasiness kind of dulls its edge, so we want to modulate the experience for you. Dead Space is obviously a very dark place to spend time, and you know, that’s part of the goal.”

One aspect players frequently overlook is the seamless integration of sound effects into the atmosphere. They are such a basic component of every game, yet most players don’t even notice them — it’s natural. If the sound effects were missing, of course, that would be another story.

“[Dead Space] actually has the sliders in it so you can adjust sound effects and music separately. It’s kind of interesting to turn the music off and play through it. Or vice versa — turn the sound effects off and play with the just the music. You’ll see immediately how much less effective it is,” states Boyd. “In this case, there’s a synergistic relationship between the sound effects and the music. Taking either one away doesn’t let you have the experience; it makes it significantly less.”

When creating Dead Space 2, Boyd and his team made sure that the line between these two aspects would become blurred for the player. He also remarks at how both the music and sound effects are tied together as one unit: “[They] work really closely together in Dead Space. Sometimes the line is really blurry between what you’re hearing — are you hearing music, or are you hearing sound effects? A lot of the environmental sounds of the world have a tonal element to them. It all becomes part of the psychology of the presentation.”

“Often the music will just trail off and disappear completely, and we use that as an effect as well. Sometimes the scariest thing we can do, the best mood we can set, is just silence.”

In Pulse, the team at Cipher Prime also uses silence to set the mood. However, instead of scaring the player, the game uses silence sparingly, as a way of giving the player time to breath. “I think that sound is appropriate in a game in the same places that it’s appropriate in another medium,” Dain Saint explains.

“The Pulse menu isn’t exactly silent; it just has this sort of ambient feeling where it has this sound that is similar to an orchestra tuning up. It prepares you. But when you are going into a song, the game becomes silent. When the track is finished, the game is silent again. We use silence in the game to give the feeling of performance.”

“It’s kind of that calm before the storm,” says Kerry Gilbert. “You’re getting ramped up and you’re ready, and this is right before the curtain opens.”

However, in Dead Space, the use of silence is an interesting gameplay element that almost always changes.

“The airless sections are, if not unique, certainly signature elements for Dead Space. It’s a different sound; it’s a very unusual sound,” states Boyd. “If you haven’t heard it, then the first time you do it’s quite surprising to have all of the sound sucked away and to just be left with your heartbeat and breath. I don’t know if a lot of games are doing that.”

Audio design changes drastically from game to game; objectives are different, atmosphere is different, and every team has different ideas of what they want to create with their games.

“I went to a talk at GDC, not this year but the year prior, and there was a big talk from a lot of the audio designers,” recalls Dain Saint. “They said, ‘Hey, guess what? People are shutting off your music because your music sucks.’ And it’s not that your music is bad, it’s just that if you’re playing something like Red Dead Redemption, and every time you go into this town the exact same song plays on loop, eventually you don’t want to hear it any more. You have to design your music more intelligently so that people don’t shut it off.”

“You have to be smart; you have to figure out ways to have the game dynamically change the music and generate and synthesize, and do everything you can do to avoid the pattern detection algorithm that humans have where somebody says, ‘Oh, that music just looped. That’s the beginning of the song again.’ If you can avoid that, then you can get a lot more mileage out of the same music. It’s just a matter of intelligent audio design, not just necessarily subtle design.”

篇目4，Could Mobile Game Audio BE More Annoying?!

Peter Drescher

[Editor's Note: Peter Drescher's last article for O'Reilly Digital Media ("Could Ringtones BE More Annoying?!") was such a hit that we asked him to expand on the concept. The following article is an edited transcript of his session "Creating Audio for Mobile Games," which he presented last month at the Game Developers Conference. To simulate the live experience, we've sprinkled audio and video clips throughout the story, corresponding with the ones Drescher played from his T-Mobile Sidekick during the presentation.]

Good afternoon. My name is Peter Drescher, and I am currently sound designer at Danger, Incorporated, makers of the Hiptop mobile internet device, also known as the T-Mobile Sidekick. I used to be a road-dog bluesman piano player until about 15 years ago, when I managed to get a job doing audio for multimedia. Since then, and through no planning on my part, I’ve become something of an expert on making little, tiny itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny audio files sound like, well … anything at all.

First I did soundtracks for After Dark screen savers that shipped on floppy disks. Then it was music stamps for the General Magic device, web audio for 56k modems, and these days, ringtones and game audio for mobile devices. And that’s what I’m talking about today.

A Cell Phone by any Other Name

Now, when I say “mobile device,” I’m talking about a cell phone or “smart” phone, but not the PSP or Game Boy. In the context of this presentation, a mobile device is defined as something that contains a radio for transmitting and receiving voice and other data over a cell phone network. We are talking about devices with fairly sophisticated operating systems, like Nokia and Motorola cell phones, or devices like the Treo and the Sidekick, because we are concerned with interactive game audio produced by the device OS (as opposed to phone conversations, FM radio broadcasts, or iPod libraries).

Figure 1. Peter Drescher plays a game while listening to music on his custom black nanoHiptop.

The Point of the Operation

When making sound effects and background music for any game, you’re trying to enhance gameplay and create a fun, exciting audio experience for the user. The last thing you want to do is be annoying, irritating, painful, or trite.

You really don’t want to be repetitive.

You really don’t want to be redundant.

You really don’t want to play the same sound over and over again.

You really get the idea.

Unfortunately, this is frequently exactly what happens when your entire audio budget is less than 100 kilobytes, as is mostly the case in resource-constrained situations like the current mobile environment. Given that one second of “CD quality” audio is about 86K, you’re going to have to use some tricks of the trade if you want to have more than a single sound effect in your game.

The most important trick is to be as ruthlessly efficient as possible. You want to squeeze every last drop of variation out of each and every byte of audio data at your disposal. Repetition is the enemy, compression is your ally, and creative use of limited resources is your battle cry. If you’re making sound effects, this means low-resolution, highly compressed samples used in multiple ways. If you’re writing music, it means MIDI. Using the techniques I’ll be demonstrating here, it is possible to produce interesting, interactive, non-repetitive, evolving soundtracks for mobile games using absurdly tiny files. The real difficulty comes when trying to make these little tiny pieces of digital audio crap actually sound good. But it can be done, and here’s how we did it.

Could Mobile Game Audio BE More Annoying?!

How About a Nice Piece of Cheese, Gromit?

Cheese Racer is a game, based on Rally X, that uses a number of techniques to produce lots of sound and music in very little space, including:

Muting and unmuting multiple tracks in a MIDI file to produce various mixes.

Playing a single sample at different pitches to produce variation.

The “pitch it up, play it down” technique for saving space.

Figure 2. This MIDI sequence contains all of the tracks used for the Cheese Racer game. It plays instruments from the built-in General MIDI soundbank, along with custom samples contained in an RMF file. (Click to enlarge.)

Let’s look at the music soundtrack first. Figure 2 is a screen shot of the MIDI sequence used in the game, displaying the complete track layout. Since this game was designed to run on the Hiptop, which uses the Beatnik Audio Engine as part of the OS, we were able to use an RMF file to create the soundtrack. This means that during gameplay, the MIDI sequence pictured here is rendered on instruments from the internal General MIDI soundbank, and on custom software instruments specifically designed for the game.

For example, the top two tracks play custom samples of drum loops:

Percussion 1 (56K MP3)

Percussion 2 (68K MP3)

Next we have a group of three tracks, playing bass, melody, and chords:

Bass (92K MP3)

Melody (92K MP3)

Chords (88K MP3)

In the code for the first level, we’ve defined ten different combinations of tracks: percussion + bass, percussion + bass + melody, bass + melody + chords, etc. You can hear what it sounds like by clicking the movie clip in Figure 3.

Figure 4. Every time you play the game, the soundtrack is different. (Click image to play movie clip.)

Figure 3. Notice how the mix changes every time the mouse gets a piece of cheese. (Click image to play movie clip.)

Because the music loop is 40 seconds long and we defined ten different combinations of tracks, each level contains more than six minutes of different music mixes. Of course, not every mix is played for 40 seconds—in fact, that’s kind of the point. Because the mix changes depending on gameplay, the music will never play exactly the same way twice, thereby increasing variation and decreasing “ear fatigue.”

But wait! There’s more! In fact, there are two more sets of tracks playing two more styles of music, using the same tempo and percussion tracks as the first level.

Therefore the entire game contains almost 20 minutes of various music mixes, using only 68K of compressed sample and MIDI data. Click on Figure 4 to hear a different performance. This time, notice the use of “bumpers” to smooth out transitions between mixes, and when moving to the next level. (Special thanks to Lucas Finklestein, Danger QA engineer and game player extraordinaire, for helping me film these sequences.)

It’s the Same, Only Different

Remember, you want as much variation as possible, and you really want to avoid hearing the same sound over and over again. This game contains only a single “trumpet fall” sound effect, but we modify the playback sample rate so that each time you pick up a piece of cheese, the sound is played at a different pitch … any similarity to the 1960s Batman theme is entirely intentional:

Fall 1 (12K MP3)

Fall 2 (12K MP3)

Fall 3 (12K MP3)

Fall 4 (12K MP3)

We also randomly vary the pitch during gameplay, so there’s no repeating pattern to it:

Random Fall (48K MP3)

Figure 5. By randomly varying the pitch of the car horn beeps, we produced multiple sounds using only one file. (Click image to play movie clip.)

The sound tends to mask the transition from one mix to another, helping to create a more seamless audio experience. In Figure 5, you can hear the same kind of pitch-shifting effect applied to car horn beeps.

Another way to save space is using the “pitch it up, play it down” technique. Here’s how it works: take your original, high-resolution sound effect and transpose it up an octave, halving the length. Then convert it to a low-resolution compressed format, like this:

Cat growl, octave up (12K MP3)

Car start, octave up (16K MP3)

Then in the game, play it down an octave:

Cat growl, octave down (20K MP3)

Car start, octave down (24K MP3)

Although the game sound might be a little crunchy, you’ve just cut the size of your file in half without losing too much audio fidelity. Obviously, the higher you pitch the sound, the “crunchier” the playback will become, but the technique can be used for custom instruments as well as sound effects, and is particularly effective on the tiny speakers in mobile devices.

Sound Design for Really Small Speakers

Duke Ellington said about arranging, “Always write for your players.” In other words, if you write a horn line you know your horn section can play well, then your arrangement will be well-played and your music will sound good, kinda by definition. The same is true when creating audio for mobile games: you have to write for your players, which in this case is usually a speaker the size of your thumbnail.

First of all, this means no bass—I mean, none, nada, fuggedaboutit. Don’t write music that gets its power or groove from a deep funky bass line, because nobody’s ever going to hear it. Snap of the snare drum—yes, boom of the kick drum— nnnnnot so much.

The same thing goes for sound effects. When making a car crash, pick a sound that has a lot of high end, then EQ the bottom right out. Applying a highpass filter at around 250Hz and maybe adding a bump around 3kHz will prevent low-end rumble from distorting the speaker, and make the sound pop where the speaker is most sensitive.

Figure 6. Waves L1 is an extraordinarily useful plugin that helps audio designed for cell phone speakers play loud and clear.

Another thing you’re going to want to do is apply a liberal dollop of L1 to almost every sound you make (see Figure 6). L1 is a compressor/limiter plugin from Waves that squishes the peaks and raises the overall volume of a sound file; it is used to fill up as much of the available digital range as possible, as shown on the right side of Figure 6.

This does two good things. First, it gives you a strong signal so that your sound will play loud and clear on the tiny speaker, and second, it gives your downsampling and compression algorithms as much meat as possible to chew on while they decimate your audio data to save space. When processing a high-resolution, CD-quality sound effect down to an 11kHz, IMA 4:1 compressed sample, a soft sound like the one on the left side of Figure 6 is going to come out sounding a lot like static.

This doesn’t mean you can’t make good sounds on cell phones; you just have to write for your players. For mobile music, melody is king. For sound effects, well, there is one category of sound that cell phones are specifically designed to produce well–vocals. Voice-overs, screams, laughs, sneezes, sighs, grunts, groans, pretty much any sound a mouth can make is guaranteed to come through a cell phone speaker with some sort of fidelity. Here’s a good example.

A Bouncin’ Beachball, Lookin’ for Love

Bob is a game that uses a number of interactive audio techniques to create a varied soundtrack. The music mix changes as the player progresses through each level, the frequently played bounce sound effect is varied depending on how fast the sprite is falling, and Bob, being a loud happy guy, says things like “Yeah!” when he gets a power-up, “Whoa” when he falls too fast, and “All right” when it’s time to play. And if these vocals sound a little familiar, yes, it’s true, I admit it … I am the voice of Bob.

Figure 7. The whimsical Bob is one of Danger’s best selling games. (Click image to play movie clip.)

Notice how the music mix changed as we played the game. The bass line got faster, the electric piano came in, etc. Each level has six or seven different combinations of instruments and tracks that flow from one to the other as you continue forward, with a full mix playing when you complete the level. That way, the music is always changing, and there’s a little reward at the end.

Figure 8. This view of the tile editor shows a section of one level with the bits for “Audio Mix #5″ shown as a blue line.

This variation is accomplished by setting bits in the level map using an editor as shown in Figure 8. Each black dot represents some sort of special tile bit (bounce, enemy, heart, etc.) and the bit for “Audio Mix #5″ is highlighted in blue. Therefore, when Bob passes through that thin blue line (and he always will at some point, because the game is a side-scroller), the music will change to mix #5. Later, if you don’t fall into the bottomless pits at mid-screen, you’ll hit the next audio zone, shown in Figure 8 as a line of black dots in the sky at the right, and then Mix #6 will play.

The Secret Yanni Technique

Figure 9. Why is this soundtrack called “the Secret Yanni Technique?” Click the image to play the movie clip.

Now we get to one of my favorite tricks of the trade, which I like to call the “Secret Yanni” technique for reasons that are too arcane to explain here. Basically, the idea is this: video games are not movies; there’s no concept of “sync to picture” because you can’t always predict when a sound effect will be played. But knowing this, you can use serendipity to your advantage, as we did in Bob with the sound effects for bonus points.

In order to save space, we wanted to play a few MIDI notes every time Bob picked up a heart. MIDI is an excellent (and in many cases, the only) choice for making sound in the mobile environment because it is an extremely efficient and flexible technology. But the question becomes, “Which notes do you play?” There’s no way to know when Bob is going to pick up points, so there’s no way to know when the bonus sound will play or how it will fit with the music. You want the effect to be “Yay!” but if the notes clash with the music, the effect is going to be more like “Ouch!”

The answer? Modal music. You restrict your soundtrack to a single mode, no key changes, no fancy chord progressions. Just keep it simple, baby—and in many cases, this is a good way to write background music anyway. For Bob, the chords are mostly ii-IV-V-I in C, and then I picked notes for the bonus points that fit the mode, using a pentatonic scale consisting of C, D, E, G, and A. If you want to get really clever, you can have the notes play at the same tempo as the music, or some polyrhythmic fraction of it. Arranging things in this manner will produce sound effects that almost never clash with the music, and sometimes will even seem to be part of it. (Click on Figure 9.)

The Sound of No Music

Figure 10. Meme is a super-chimp, fighting his way past mad scientists and evil robots by hitting them with bananas. (Click image to play movie clip.)

One way to avoid the problems associated with background music is not to have any. Another Danger game, Meme, dispenses with music altogether, and uses mood-producing sounds instead. The “evil laboratory” level demonstrates the “pitch it up, play it down” technique to an extreme degree, and is used to solve a difficult problem: how do you create a low, creepy ambience using very little memory space? Traditionally, looping ambiences have to be fairly long (and therefore fairly large), otherwise you quickly hear the unnatural repetition of the same sound playing over and over. The other problem: How do you produce a Star Trek bridge-style rumble on a tiny cell phone speaker?

The answer, of course, is … you don’t. It’s impossible. Here’s what you do instead: Make a fairly high-pitched sound with a little blip in it and a little looped vibrato, like this:

Laboratory ambience (16K MP3)

Then make a custom RMF instrument out of it so you can play it at different pitches and layer it against itself. Then try playing it lower and lower until the sound starts to disappear, then bring it back up a little. That way, you get the lowest possible hum, the sound itself is very crunchy (which kinda works in this situation), and so it sounds something like Figure 10.

Man, that’s a noisy game! You don’t really miss the music much, do you? Other techniques demonstrated are the random pitching up and down of the banana whooshes, and prominent use of “vocal” sound effects (in this case, chimp noises) which punch through the tiny speaker loud and clear.

We also do the “single sample used in multiple ways” trick for the robot factories. Each time a robot is manufactured, there’s this grating, grinding noise. It’s the electrical-zap-played-down-an-octave machine:

Figure 11. Playing the zaps and pows at different pitches can produce interesting effects without using additional space. (Click image to play movie clip.)

Zap (12K MP3)

Machine (16K MP3)

During gameplay, the bottom end goes away because the speaker’s too small to produce it, leaving only the higher-end grungy sound. Maybe it’s not the sound effect you

would have first designed for a robot factory, but it sorta kinda works and it doesn’t use any extra space.

But my favorite use of that trick in this game is the cannon sound, which is the bullet played two octaves down:

Bullet (8K MP3)

This was totally unplanned; I was simply playing around with pitch-shifting and thought, “Cool, man, we got to use that!” Sometimes, happy accidents are your most valuable tool. Check out Figure 11.

Because I Can

I have a certain advantage in producing these kinds of interactive soundtracks because:

I’m working with the Beatnik technology, which is specifically designed for this kind of thing.

I’m the oldest living content provider for the system, so I know all the tricks and techniques.

I have an intimate knowledge of the target hardware and operating system, because, well, we built it. But if you’re an independent audio producer, or working on a game intended to ship on a myriad of phones, then you’ve got some special problems.

First, you’ll have to see if your phone’s operating system gives you access to the kind of APIs you’ll need to implement things like pitch shifting and track muting.

Some do, some don’t. Then you’ll need to check if the audio subsystem can even do what you want it to. If you’re running Beatnik, you’re probably golden; if not, well, good luck. The audio capabilities of cell phones and audio engines vary widely, from the completely rudimentary to the arcanely sophisticated.

To make good decisions about how to squeeze the maximum amount of sound out of the minimum amount of space, you’ll want to design your audio taking into account the technical limitations of each platform your game is intended to run on. You’ll need to know what file types are supported, at which resolutions, and what compression algorithms are available.

If you can run hi-res MP3s, you can pretty much make any sound you like, but if you’re limited to, say, 8kHz IMA WAV files, you might want to consider using short, loud, uncomplicated sounds. These will translate better than complex noise, so forget that symphonic sample and use a single flute line instead. If the audio engine’s output rate is 44k, rocking! Go for that screaming guitar solo, but if you’re constrained to 11kHz, you’re up against Nyquist, so you might be better off with a midrange piano solo. And no cell phone speaker is going to produce any bass whatsoever, so plan on using all tweet and no boom.

Most important, you’ll need to know what your audio budget is—how much space is being allocated for sound. In most cases, if you want to make music, you’re going to have to use General MIDI played on the internal wavetable, simply because it provides by far the most audio bang for your digital buck. But do yourself a favor and write for the basics—piano, horn, kick, snare, maybe some strings—and avoid things like the goblin pad, or the shakuhachi, and the other lesser-known patches. You have no idea how those instruments will sound on different devices and different soundbanks, whereas a piano is pretty much going to sound like a piano no matter where you go. In fact, solo piano music is usually a pretty safe bet in a General MIDI world, and I would suggest that being constrained to a single instrument didn’t seem to hinder Bach’s, Beethoven’s, or Chopin’s creativity.

All That’s Old Is New Again

Truth be told, none of the techniques I’ve described today are new or inventive. I am certainly not an innovative genius or a radical visionary, I’ve just been doing this stuff for a while. In fact, creating audio for mobile games these days is strikingly similar to producing audio for PC games in the ’80s and doing web audio in the ’90s. The same kind of audio problems and solutions will apparently arise in almost any resource-constrained, developing, competitive environment.

But since we’ve been here before (twice!), you think we would’ve learned a lesson or two. We’d know that closed, proprietary audio formats are bad and open standards are good.

We’d know that bandwidth bottlenecks will expand, and so we’d plan for scalability now.

We’d know that all DRM schemes are doomed, and that the best way to make a buck is to give the customer what they want, not criminalize what they’re going to do anyway.

But most important, we’d know that the same techniques that have worked for us in the past will be useful today and in the future. In other words, you want interesting, well-produced soundtracks for your mobile games? Hire old game-audio guys!

By the way, these “lessons learned” are not mine, they are just a few from the 2004 Project Bar-B-Q Mobile Audio session.

That Was Then, This Is Now

But finally, my friends, I’m going to stand here and tell you that the mobile industry moves so fast that everything I’ve said today about creating soundtracks for mobile games is already complete and utter bullshit. And I’ll tell you why: convergence.

The advent of music phones with gigabyte removable storage and broadband network connections is going to make mobile game music completely obsolete.

Really, think about it for a minute: games on your cell phones are not like games on your Xbox, or even your PSP. Given the bandwidth restrictions and the CPU usage, mobile games tend to be small, fun, time-killers. They’re not 40-hour immersive environments like God of War; they’re what you do while you’re waiting for something else to happen in your life. And because of the technical limitations, and because they’re cheap, and because, let’s face it, folks, they’re phones, not dedicated gaming platforms, mobile game soundtracks are going to be kinda low-res no matter what you do.

And this is all well and good when that’s all you’ve got. But what happens when that same device, that cool little gadget that takes pictures, does email, surfs the Web, plays games, and—oh yeah—makes phones calls also contains six hours of your favorite music? Ask yourself what you would prefer to listen to while you kill a little time playing little game—some low-res MIDI soundtrack written by who knows who (and that would be me in this case), or that funky-cool Grammy-winning groove you just uploaded to your phone from iTunes? Come on, it’s no contest.

And I know this because I’ve done it, and it’s too damn cool for school. It’s “roll your own game audio;” it’s CheeseRacer with an Aerosmith soundtrack, or the Greenskeepers, or the New York Philharmonic, or whatever you want. I’m tellin’ ya, it’s the best thing since flavored toothpaste, and pretty soon aaalll the cool kids are going to be doing it. Some Motorola phones already have iTunes built in, and the cell phone carriers are all jumping on board the “music phone” bandwagon like it was headed for Gold Country. Personally, I just took my custom black Hiptop and slapped an iPod nano on the back with duct tape (because I’m a musician, and all musicians must use duct tape) and voilà! (See Figure 12.)

Figure 12.The nanoHiptop (Duct Tape Edition) is the essence of convergence: two refined tools fused into one.

Introducing the nanoHiptop (not a real product, not available in stores, not condoned by either Danger or Apple Computer, do not try this at home, may void warranty).

Nonetheless, check it out, it’s a cool concept, it works great—and it represents a paradigm shift in the way we’re going to think about creating audio for mobile games.

篇目5，Video Game Music: Player Immersion

by Gina Zdanowicz

Music has always been an important part of entertainment media. As gaming continues to evolve, game music is more heavily relied upon to integrate with the games visuals, to set the scene, and to evoke players’ emotions. Game music should affect the gameplay, and the gameplay should affect the music. The player’s actions influence the interactivity and evolution of the music, just as the music influences the player’s decisions during game play. This combination immerses the player deeper into the gaming experience.

One of the biggest challenges in creating music for video games is in understanding the limits of the game audio engines while trying to provide a seamless interactive experience.

Techniques such as varying tempo, genre, instrumentation and musical notes can set the perfect mood for each area of the game and tell the player exactly what emotions they should feel in those areas.

A layered score is a technique that has several streams with different instruments on each. Those streams should be composed so they are strong on their own and work well with the games visuals, but also be able to be mixed together with the other streams to evolve the music as the game play changes.

Music that builds to a crescendo can signal to the player there is danger just ahead. A boss battle may require more intense music with several layers of instruments and heavy percussion. After the boss is defeated, the music slows down in tempo and the instrumentation thins out, signaling to the player that the danger is no longer imminent.

Super Mario Brothers utilized increased tempo to signal to the player that time is running out, which evokes a sense of urgency to complete the level before running out of time. Dead Space 2 uses ambient soundscapes and a large orchestra to create an eerie, yet larger than life feeling. A small string quartet was used in the game to contrast the large orchestra and to portray the vulnerability of the main character.

Both music and visuals must be well thought out and tightly integrated to create a cohesive and ambient environment. A game’s pace is just as important as the musical build up that allows the player time to feel safe in order to deliver the next tense moment with impact.

When you take a look at how far music in gaming has come, it speaks volumes to its importance in the game industry. Music is no longer just set in the background of the game. Rhythm genre game titles such as Rock Band and Guitar Hero offer a twist on standard game play and offer music as the game.

In Part I of this article, lead audio designer Gina Zdanowicz discusses how video game music enhances a player’s gameplay experience. In Part II, she offers examples of diegetic and non-diegetic music in games.

A technique that is becoming more popular in games is diegetic music. Diegetic music refers to music that originates from within the game world. It’s always nice when a game score can incorporate epic music in the game world, but in real life when you are walking around in a park or on a beach, you don’t hear any music unless you have your headphones on. Diegetic music, although coming from an object within the game, can still set the mood of the environment.

Let’s take a look at some games that use diegetic music to enhance the player’s immersion into the game world.

Fallout 3 makes great use of diegetic and non-diegetic music. Characters in the game have wrist-mounted computers called the Pip-boy 3000, as well as radios scattered around the game world which play music and other broadcasts from in-game radio stations. If the player has their Pip-boy 3000 turned on, they have to be careful of the radio alerting NPC’s to their presence. When the radio function is turned off, non-diegetic background music is played through the game world.

Bioshock also uses a combination of diegetic and non-diegetic music, as well as no music, to set the mood. In the game’s opening scene, the player escapes from the plane wreckage to a lighthouse set on a small rocky island. The lack of music in this scene hints to the player the feelings of a desperate struggle to survive. After the player enters the lighthouse, music starts to fade into the scene. The music is coming from downstairs, which provokes the player to follow the music down the flight of stairs to find the radio in a bathysphere. The music plays two roles in this example: It gives the player a reason to move forward in the game, as well as sets the mood.

The use of diegetic music in Bioshock really underscores the dying city when the player enters a room with a scratchy, 60’s-era record playing. Diegetic music, which is used in place of orchestral background music, can be heard from around corners or can be muffled by doors.

Left 4 Dead allows a player to turn on a jukebox, which will attract a zombie horde. During this attack, instead of non-diegetic music playing, the jukebox music continues to play even if the jukebox is out of visual range.

Grand Theft Auto is, while cliché, a good example of diegetic music. Car radios broadcast different stations and songs that the player can choose to tune into while driving the vehicles in the game. After all, who doesn’t love riding in a car with the music pumping?

A diegetic switch is a technique which can be used to continue the diegetic music throughout the game. The music starts off as a diegetic broadcast from a radio or other source within the game, and as the scene changes, the music switches to a non-diegetic version of the same song and continues to play in that environment.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time starts with the diegetic version of Saria’s as it directs the player through the lost woods maze. As the song grows louder, the player is aware that they are moving forward in the right direction. If they player goes off course, the song’s volume decreases, alerting the player to change direction. After the player learns the song, it becomes non-diegetic music in that environment.

As video games evolve, game music must also evolve, allowing for a cohesive integration for a seamless visual and aural experience, which will deeply immerse the player into the game world and keep them there until they press the pause button.