1. Intro to Procedural
Audio for Video Games
Michael Rose
mir@imm.dtu.dk
Nov 28, 2012
Tuesday, November 29, 2011

2. Topics
• Who
• What
• Why
• How
• Play
Tuesday, November 29, 2011

3. My background
• Wander through sciences
• Mistaken for engineer
• Early multimedia industry
• Back to DTU and DADIU
• make ‘wooden’ music, michaelgrose.net
Tuesday, November 29, 2011

4. A Unity-Max/MSP Example
Procedural Audio in Unity’s Bootcamp Demo
and the relevant forum thread
And an adaptive music example
Tuesday, November 29, 2011

5. Why Procedural?
• Samples take lots of time to make, adapt
and integrate
• Pre-recorded music gets repetitive, fixed
sound palette
• Audio takes lots of space (esp. for smart
phone games)
• Audio experience is not as interactive and
adaptive as the rest of the game experience
Tuesday, November 29, 2011

6. Inspiration
Live Coding - programming audio as performance art
shows some of the possibilities.
The BBC explains.
Digital music toys, such as Otomata
Tuesday, November 29, 2011

7. Supercollider
• Programming language and environment designed
for real time audio
• Started in 1996 by James McCartney, now an open
source project
• Smalltalk object structure, C style syntax,
functional properties (1st class functions, and
more)
• Download it from supercollider.sourceforge.net
Tuesday, November 29, 2011

8. Client - Server Structure
Separation gives lots of flexibility, plus many different
language interfaces on the client side
Tuesday, November 29, 2011

9. Plays nice with others
Tuesday, November 29, 2011

10. Let’s take a test drive
• Look at the install folder
• A good tutorial set
• Designing Sound examples (based on the
procedural work of Andy Farnell)
Tuesday, November 29, 2011

11. Supercollider and Unity
• Early days, work being done Tinus,
discussed in this forum thread
• But he needs to be able to turn off FMOD.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011

12. Let’s Have Fun
Tuesday, November 29, 2011