• Goals:

  • want to make a game based on my experience being a music producer
  • Working on restricting ideas and restricting what the player can do since the idea of FL studios as a game for non-producers is a lot to handle
  • Thinking of having the game as a phone and tv game like Jackbox

• Ideas:

  • Ideas of recording and mixing like on a mixer board
  • Similar Style to Incredibox
  • Do I want to include Rhythm?
  • How much music knowledge do I want the player to have?

• Precedents

  • My Singing Monsters
  • VCV Rack
  • Mu Cartographer
  • Nauticrawl
  • incredibox
  • tenori-on

• Media Research

  • Unity
  • VCV Rack
  • Easy Controller

• Books

• https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.libproxy.newschool.edu/lib/newschool/reader.action?docID=1602530 (The synthesizer : a comprehensive guide to understanding, programming, playing, and recording the ultimate electronic music instrument Vail, Mark. 2014)
  • modular synthesizer: an electronic instrument consisting of a variety of components from one or more manufacturers mounted according to the user’s wishes in a cabinet that provides power; for the instrument to generate sound, the user must patch multiple components or modules together so that audio, control-voltage, gate , and trigger signals are routed through the modules; see ch. 3 for much more about modular synthesizers
    • Modular Synths
      • gate: an analog timing-pulse control signal generated by activity such as a note played on a keyboard or a step reached by an analog step sequencer , which causes a voltage to jump to a high level and stay there until the keyboard note is released or the sequencer step ends
      • analog step sequencer: a source of control voltages, gates, and triggers that repeats a pattern over a specific number of steps or stages and provides user controls to alter aspects of the entire sequence as well as each step/stage; an internal or separate clock provides periodic signals for analog sequencers to proceed from step to step
      • trigger: an analog timing-pulse control signal generated by activity such as a note played on a keyboard or a step reached by a sequencer, which causes a voltage to jump to a high level for a brief, fixed duration before dropping to the previous level
    • Different types of synths
      • The Synthesizer: A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding, Programming, Playing, and Recording the Ultimate Electronic Music Instrument
      • Subtractive Synthesis: the use of oscillators that generate richly harmonic waveforms and routing their signals through voltage-controlled filters to attenuate specific harmonics and contour the resulting timbre
      • Additive Synthesis: creating complex timbres using multiple oscillators that generate less complex waveforms, traditionally sine waves
      • Sine Waves: oscillator-generated, periodic voltages that rise and fall smoothly and symmetrically, following the trigonometric formula for the sine function; at audible frequencies a sine wave produces only the fundamental frequency and no harmonics, sounding similar to a flute; at sub-audible frequencies, the sine wave excels at producing vibrato by modulating oscillator pitch and tremolo by modulating amplitude v
      • Vibrato: periodic variations in pitch, typically at a rate of around 7Hz
    • With wavetable synthesis, oscillators scan through digitized waveforms stored in ROM. Wavetables can be samples or generated using mathematical equations, and they’re typically much more complex than average analog waveforms.
    • Analog synthesizers produce pitched tones using one or more oscillators, although most oscillators can generate frequencies beneath and beyond the perceptible 20Hz– 20kHz spectrum. An analog voltage-controlled oscillator ( VCO ) typically produces a waveform or waveshape that generates timbres containing diverse frequency components. For example, oscillators 1 and 2 on a Minimoog produce triangle , sawtooth , triangular sawtooth (tri-saw), and three pulse waves: square, wide rectangle, and narrow rectangle. Since the Mini’s third oscillator serves as both an audio and a low-frequency oscillator ( LFO ), Bob Moog, Jim Scott, Bill Hemsath, and Chad Hunt replaced the tri-saw with a reverse sawtooth wave, which is more useful for modulation purposes. Common VCO waveforms found on analog synths other than the Minimoog include sine and variable pulse-width . Pulse-width modulation continually alters the timbre in ways subtle to extreme. Because the sine wave lacks frequencies beyond the fundamental, it produces a flute-like sound.

• The Game Music Toolbox by Marios Aristopoulos The book is an interesting approach on putting out information on game music by structuring it like an “open world game”. You can start at any point of the book and read how game music works. Each chapter goes into an in depth view on 20 popular games soundtracks and why they work. Since music is not just important in my game but also a key component to the game itself.
  • Music Producers get paid based on minutes completed for a game, could be 100 per minute
  • How composers get hired
  • Career paths of sound engineers and designers
  • Smooth transition between music is important
  • How and when to set up triggers for music change/scene change
  • Changing different kinds of effects on instruments when player does something (loses health)
  • How audio implementation works

• https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.libproxy.newschool.edu/lib/newschool/reader.action?docID=3339561 (Playing with Sound: A Theory of Interacting with Sound and Music in Video Games)
  • This book goes into why listening to sound is different than interacting with sound. Also the event driven nature of interactive sound.
• Articles
  • https://www.cepi.io/exploring-the-world-of-modular-synthesis-a-comprehensive-guide/
    • Types of Modular Synthesizers
      • Analog Modular Synthesizers
        • Analog modular synthesizers are a type of synthesizer that use analog circuitry to generate sound
      • Digital Modular Synthesizers
        • Digital modular synthesizers are a type of synthesizer that uses digital signal processing techniques to generate sound.
      • Hybrid Modular Synthesizers
        • Hybrid modular synthesizers are a combination of both digital and analog synthesis technologies.
  • https://delu.medium.com/a-perceptually-meaningful-audio-visualizer-ee72051781bc
    • signals/sound waves into sine waves/pure frequency components. These components have an amplitude and phase
    • Loud sounds have large shapes, and quiet sounds have small shapes.
    • A pure sine wave is just a circle, where the radius corresponds to amplitude
    • Purer sounds are very round because they’re made of very few sine waves.
    • Brighter sounds end up looking spiky because they have many frequency components and also digital sound has limited resolution/is “pixelated”.
    • Percussive/transient sounds flash on the screen because these signals are very short.
    • Sustained tones create sustained shapes because tones are periodic signals that have repeating parts that have the same shape, and these shapes keep getting traced out over and over again.

https://youtu.be/spUNpyF58BY?si=odiKJb-nBGP2KFXG