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View Full Version : Producer Journal: The Beat Goes on: Dynamic Music in Spore



Judhudson
02-22-2008, 01:37 PM
Gamespy (http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/spore/853810p1.html) has a great article of the music from Spore. Audio engineers Kent Jolly and Aaron McLeran speaked to a crowd at the Game Developer Conference on how they brought their dynamic tunes to life.

The team used a special version of a software tool called Pure Data (or Pd), customized by Electronic Arts and affectionately called EAPd. Pd has a graphical interface that visually shows you events that can be linked together with lines, creating a kind of flowchart to describe how sounds are created. Jolly gave a quick demonstration of how to create a nifty conga drum loop: Gather together some drum samples, use a metronome routine to trigger off a random drum every beat, and loop it every eight beats… presto! Instant drum loop. This was achieved with only a few boxes in Pd.
Thanks to Spores Illustrated (http://spore.strategyplanet.gamespy.com/) for bringing it to attention.