When was the last time you remembered the music playing in a game during an epic battle?

Game scores aren’t memorable in the same way a John Williams score is that expertly accentuates a well placed haymaker to the jaw of a fascist soldier. This is in large part because a film composer watches a near finished version of the movie to match music to action, whereas a game's composer must contend with unpredictable player agency: a player can choose to do none of the things the music would otherwise be trying to highlight. As a result, most battle music in games is kept generic to simply highlight a sense of intensity or challenge, rather than dynamically intermingle with the ebb and flow of combat.

For Example

Take Uncharted 4, one of the most cinematic games created to date. Its music, while well composed, is disjointed from the action: it is adaptive insofar as the “battle music” will pick up and drop off when the action sequence picks up and ends, but it does not directly follow the on-screen action.

What’s the Problem?

Traditional game audio engines, including Wwise and FMOD, react to information and events from other game systems to determine how their "interactive music" should adapt. Such "reactive audio engines" are challenged by only being able to listen to the game systems for updates: it’s an entirely one-way street. There is no way for the game to listen for changes in the music to coordinate with the audio.

Introducing Koreographer Cinema

Koreographer is the proactive audio system that complements traditional reactive audio engines like Wwise and FMOD. Koreographer provides important music timing information to game systems to create a fully interactive music system. With Koreographer, a game can delay a player's haymaker punch by 30ms to land exactly on beat, providing a perceptual boost from the synchronization with the inherent musical impact. The game could simultaneously queue a stinger to land on that future sync point to create a music system that seemingly adapts the music score to the player action. With Koreographer Cinema, we can finally achieve the cinematic music scoring to dynamic game systems.

LEt’s Build Things Together

To find out more about how Koreographer Cinema can give your game fully interactive audio, contact us. Koreographer Cinema is adaptable and can work in most environments including Unity, C, C#, Unreal, Wwise and more. We’re constantly working on Koreographer’s capabilities. Contact us to schedule a consultation.

Koreographer Cinema is built on a foundation of our Koreographer technology, a proactive audio system that has been used by over 1500 developers to create all types of new musical experiences.