Music Design: Between Game Development and Music Composition (Video Course)

"Tell me something important about videogame music without actually speaking about music."

Music design is a process of specifying of what music you want in your game and how this music should respond as the user interacts with the game.

When thinking about the possible music in your game, you quickly realize there are myriads of reasons why some music should play. Music can react to your player's current location in the world ("city", "dark forest", "underground"), the current mood ("victorious", "threat", "imminent defeat"), and other music-worthy situations ("bonus round", "boss fight", "being in a secret room", etc.)

This lecture is mainly about spotting these reasons and figuring out how to accommodate multiple reasons at the same time. It is about design decisions that should be taken and committed to when starting with music in a game.

Topics covered:

• What Is Music Design?
• Sources of Information about the Game
• Adaptive Music
• Static Music
• Use of Music 
• Choosing a Genre
• Genres in Adaptive Music 
• When to Change Music 
• Amount of Music
• Balancing the Content Exposure
• Use of Silence
• Frequency of Changes
• Musical Contexts
• Simultaneous Contexts
• Numeric Parameters
• Location-driven Contexts
• Day Cycle Contexts and Weather
• Stealth, Trespass, and Crime Contexts
• Combat Contexts
• Minigame Contexts: Racing
• Story-driven Contexts
• GUI-driven Contexts
• Diegetic Music