10/10/2019

Visgraf participates in a symposium on computational music.

Turma no workshop de música procedural em jogos do Visgraf

Even hundreds of kilometers from the sea, it's impossible not to be gripped by tension when listening to John Williams' main theme in the classic film "Jaws." The escalating and terrifying alternation of just two musical notes makes the possibility of the predator being right there in your living room believable. In games, it's no different. A dynamic soundtrack that accompanies the moments of the game is capable of keeping the player completely absorbed. But how do you compose this soundtrack when the movements can't be predicted?

With the goal of disseminating procedural music tools in games, Visgraf gave a workshop on the subject at the 17th Brazilian Symposium on Computational Music (SBMC), held in São João del-Rei (MG), from September 2Thursdays to 27th.

Aimed at an audience of computer scientists, musicians, artists, and mathematicians, the event seeks to disseminate recent developments in the fields of computational music, sound and music processing, music information retrieval, multimedia performance, and other topics related to art, science, and technology.

During the Visgraf workshop at SBMC, IMPA doctoral students Pedro Arthur Souza and José Eduardo Ayres taught the class how to run a game with procedural music on the Chunity platform , which combines the Chuck program , used for music development, with Unity , used for game development. Since the program is recent and unknown to most people, Pedro and José opted to create a simple program with basic shapes that could be successfully run during the four-hour course.

“In normal games, the same music plays throughout the entire match, and after a while it starts to get boring. The idea behind procedural music is that it gives the impression of playing infinitely, and you don't notice the repetition. Because it's procedural, you control the music. If the game is in a more cheerful part, the music becomes more cheerful; if it's in a more suspenseful part, it becomes more mysterious, and so on. The idea is to control the feeling that the music will convey,” explains Pedro.

An example of this is a key moment in the game developed by Visgraf for the workshop, when the ball goes out of bounds and the player loses the game. “We wanted to use Chopin's funeral march, but it's an extremely complicated piece to play. So we kept a similar base in the left hand, simulating the piano, and in the right hand, which is extremely complicated, we made it completely procedural, using the notes he used. It brought the same feeling as Chopin's music, but in a completely new and different way,” says José Eduardo.

This lesson is related to other Visgraf projects. Graph Composer , selected for an exhibition by the German organization Imaginary , is one of them. The project consists of an application for constructing musical compositions using graphs. In a graph that models music, we have a directed graph that represents a deterministic or stochastic sequence of musical notes. The nodes represent musical notes while the edges represent the transition between notes. The music is played as a path along the graph: a sequence of notes (or chords) played with a specific duration.

“In Graph Composer we also use Chunity , a program that was run during the SBMC workshop. But in a much more complex structure. The idea is that both a layperson and a professional musician can play with the screen and produce a pleasant sound. The application is very intuitive; you just need to start experimenting to understand how it works,” said Luiz Velho, lead researcher of Visgraf.

Still on display in Germany, Graph Composer was also taken to the symposium, where musicians, computer scientists, and mathematicians were able to interact with the screen. “From a dissemination standpoint, it was very interesting. Many first-year computer science students don't quite understand what a graph is for, what its applications are. So they were amazed. It's always good for undergraduates to be able to see a little beyond what they're doing,” reveals José Eduardo.