FMOD | Unity Demo - Vertical Remixing

Music to Vertical Remix To is where we actually get to start playing with interactive music. Interactive music loosely refers to music that is influenced by the listener, and in video games the listener is the player. Video game music being interactive can be as simple as the music changing to match the locations of the game as the player moves around the game world, or can be complicated enough to generate music in real time based on the player's actions. Interactive music is great because when done well it is one of the biggest factors that drives player immersion.

When creating interactive music systems for games, the techniques used can generally be lumped into two camps: Vertical and Horizontal Techniques. Very loosely speaking Vertical Techniques find ways of changing the instruments and sounds played without changing the song, while Horizontal Techniques find ways to smoothly change from one song to the next. These techniques exist to solve problems in audio brought about by different players experiencing the game at different speeds or orders.

In this Project I will be exploring some Vertical Techniques. For the composition I will be composing a short loop with 5 instruments, each with 3 variations (4 including silence). When we implement the audio, we will playback the music by choosing different variations of each instrument randomly, creating hundreds of unique variations.