The Renaissance

With powerful native DSP capabilities a renaissance in procedural and synthetic audio will revolutionise game play and allow the lost magic of synthetic sound effects and tracker style interactive/adaptive music to come back. Sequencing and sound effects generation will move out of the studio and back onto the platform. Intelligence can be applied to music scoring in real-time. Already the game Spore has commissioned Brian Eno, a long time champion of procedural composition, to write a soundtrack. The wheel has turned. It is interesting for me as a programmer to witness one full cycle of the so called "wheel of life" that we were taught in computer science classes at university. The forces driving development tend to migrate specialised functions into dedicated hardware which are then slowly subsumed back into the native CPU over time. It has taken 20 years for the capabilities that were available in the SID soundchip to be available again to the game audio programmer, only now they are a vastly more powerful. For the programmer and content designer this has massive advantages. In the absence of specialised proprietary devices with unusual instruction sets, code for synthesisers and effects written in ordinary C or C++ such as Perry Cooks STK or Puredata externals can be made portable. This leads to a common exchange form for synthesists and sound designers. New standards are being discussed for a common XML based exchange format for dynamic audio which builds on the apparently abandoned MPEG4-SA (structured audio) protocol based on Csound, which was probably too far ahead of its time.