4 ms·

A music player that is able to change the music dynamically is neat in itself, but to me the true story behind systems like these is the tools and processes use

A music player that is able to change the music dynamically is neat in itself, but to me the true story behind systems like these is the tools and processes used to create the content for them. Making a technical system approachable to a creative mindset is at least as much of a challenge as the system itself. iMUSE was used for some really beautiful music in its time, so LucasArts had this figured out. But I'd be curious to learn how they did it.

WorldMaker 1y ago
To my understanding: iMUSE had the benefit of being something of the peak of the Programmer-Musician. The lead developers on iMUSE were also the musicians in one way or another. In the 80s/early 90s a lot of music was added to games by directly programming it into the game ROM, there was a great need at that time for programmers who were also musically literate to design the music in games. Several of the LucasArts composers directly straddled this line of entering the industry at the time when a lot of music was hardcoded into software as source code and watching the industry shift around them to being able to bring in "real" musicians without programming backgrounds. Some of them retired or pseudo-retired in that shift, others fought to be seen as "real" musicians and had great careers even after the shift. (They were all real musicians to me, as a player and fan.) Today we're starting to see the growth of the Musician-Programmer. Modern DAWs and middleware like FMOD and Wwise allow a lot of the dynamicism and layering for the musicians willing to learn it, dabble in just enough technical knowledge to be dangerous (as a good thing). There's probably always going to be an interesting Venn diagram intersection of Musician and Programmer. They are related mathematically and historically. Most of the earliest versions of punch cards were for looms (weaving), then for music, with computers being the third application. The tools and processes change over time, but the relationships remain.

WorldMaker 1y ago

To my understanding: iMUSE had the benefit of being something of the peak of the Programmer-Musician. The lead developers on iMUSE were also the musicians in one way or another. In the 80s/early 90s a lot of music was added to games by directly programming it into the game ROM, there was a great need at that time for programmers who were also musically literate to design the music in games. Several of the LucasArts composers directly straddled this line of entering the industry at the time when a lot of music was hardcoded into software as source code and watching the industry shift around them to being able to bring in "real" musicians without programming backgrounds. Some of them retired or pseudo-retired in that shift, others fought to be seen as "real" musicians and had great careers even after the shift. (They were all real musicians to me, as a player and fan.) Today we're starting to see the growth of the Musician-Programmer. Modern DAWs and middleware like FMOD and Wwise allow a lot of the dynamicism and layering for the musicians willing to learn it, dabble in just enough technical knowledge to be dangerous (as a good thing). There's probably always going to be an interesting Venn diagram intersection of Musician and Programmer. They are related mathematically and historically. Most of the earliest versions of punch cards were for looms (weaving), then for music, with computers being the third application. The tools and processes change over time, but the relationships remain.