Any music requests?

For collaboration between the different artists creating music and sound for vegastrike.
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Any music requests?

Post by kensuguro »

Hey, I've got the original wav files to the music, and I'm getting ready to put them on ftp. But before I do that, I thought I'd make a couple of more new tunes if any are needed.

It's been so long, I'm not sure what the dev status on the music is. Can someone give me a list of maybe 2-3 songs that could be used? (or which old tunes that need to be replaced) And this time I'll be wise enought to keep the MIDI files so we can keep notation+audio for all the music.
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Post by arno »

Hi !

How can I send you a file : via mail ? Shall I put one on a ftp ?

Sayonara !
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Post by kensuguro »

thanks for offering your creative efforts.
you can put the music on ftp and post the link here.

Hey by the way, are there plans to implement some sort of multi track playback? (like MOD?) Since I'll keep all the original files for the next few songs, I can easily convert to multi track format if anyone's willing to try it out.
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Post by klauss »

Ken!

Hi... first of all, many of the tracks were badly clipped, so I processed them. Check out the thread with the improved music files. I would like your opinion mostly, since it's your work. I'm already redoing some of them, which turned out wrong. Read the comments for a list of things I'm redoing. I'll eventually upload the new versions (when I have them).

My idea is to not change your work too much, but regain some of the lost quality and dynamics (due to clipping). And, also, improve the synthesizer's output generally (reverb, for instance, goes a long way).

As for new songs, take a look at this thread:
Speech and sound.
There we discussed many things. Mainly, the current music is themeless, and that is bad. The tracks are good, but they can't be sequenced well because they're either unrelated or all the same.

Basically, we need per-race or per-faction (or group of factions, whatever) music for a range of situations. There doesn't have to be a one to one track correspondance, but close to it. Tracks can be reused, but they must, as a group, create distinct moods.

There is a list of situations (a somewhat big one) in that thread, in this page.

There is a smaller one, more concise, and more well though, around this page.

You should read the whole discussion, though. Skip the parts that are unrelated to the music (which are vast), and it isn't as long as it seems.


To sum up: we have to start defining per-race or per-faction styles, and create sets of music tracks for those styles.

Also: there's a temptive playlist in CVS: if you check out the data4.x/.vegastrike/playlists tree, you'll see something which is quite self-explanatory. More can be done with those playlists, if propper tracks are inputted in them.
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Post by kensuguro »

well, a lot of them are sort of un-help-able since they were compressed at recording anyway. (cut a bit of quality for speed) The main problem is that they're not very homogenous because they were mastered to sound homogenous with whatever songs I completed at the time. And too bad I don't have the uncompressed original versions for most of the songs. Should have kept them tho.

So how's the sound dev right now? Is the idea to use less compression and maintain more dynamics?

You know what I think? I think it's better to just screw the old version and work on a totally new set. Everyone's probably dead tired of the old songs anwyay. hehe.
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Post by kensuguro »

gotcha klauss, yeah, there's definitely a problem with theme and inter-race difference.. The idea was kind of there to begin with, like terran was so and so and aera was a certain style.. then the whole playlist thing kind of got messed up where some tunes played out of place and all that, all this while the current playback mechanism was being developed. The bottom line was Daniel and I wanted to create a starting ground for development, and hurry the hell up to get an initial set going. The idea was to first get that going, and then see what needs to be improved, which is what you guys are doing now. (the clean up job, hehe)

So, it's all cool. Redoing all the tunes will be cool, but it's going to take a lot of effort. Even the music right now took a while, even though it was produced extremely roughly.

I'll go through the threads, and see if I can come up with any new tunes that follow the new format. As soon as we get a basic set going, then everyone can start adding to it.

edit:
whoa man, you gotta give me a concise list of the monster thread.. it's just way too long with info spread all over. What was the final verdict on the music structure and different styles?
Last edited by kensuguro on Mon Oct 03, 2005 4:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by klauss »

Hehe... you don't know me.
I help the unhelpable.

Even if it's wrong for me to say it.

If it's of any use, I kind of regard aerapeace (or was it aerathemebattle?) as a very distinctive "Vegastrike Theme Song". I would definitely keep it, and work that theme around, playing variations in every other track.

I know it will take A LOT of work... there's no rush. The basics, as you say, are there. It's time to clean up, so we don't have to worry about the timeframe, only the quality.

I'm up for quality encodings. We were talking somewhere about adding FLAC support. Of course, it will be necessary to provide alternative downloads. But if I have the originals, uncompressed or at least at high quality rates, I can take care of that.

Just to give you an idea of how much I value quality, I do my recordings at 96Khz/32bits (in fact, I would se 192Khz, but I don't have an ADC up to the task). The 32 bits I get from postprocessing a 24-bit input with a nice anti-anti-aliasing of mine which works out the fine details. Very neat stuff. Of course, I can't actually hear the difference. I only hear the difference between 24 bits and 32 bits when either I do very heavy post-processing or when I'm doing the benchmarks. But, quality originals are worth the work (besides, it's fun work).
More: I even added a first-order sigma/delta noise shaper to the soundserver's volume control, which is now done in software (because hardware volume control was getting troublesome). You could say that's a little over the line (then I won't say I wanted a 9th order noise shaper - but performance issues convinced me otherwise), but it was actually so easy to do and so lacking of cons, that I had to.

I'm not sure what's Daniel's view of this quality matter... he never expressed an opinion either way. I guess the only real issue that could justify low quality encodings is download size, which can be fixed with alternative downloads, or webspace availability, which I can fix because I have ample storage space where I can stash the originals, and chuck_starchaser has quite some online space where to dump downloads.
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Post by kensuguro »

the factions and races.. I forgot how many divisions we had back then, but I remembered we were trying to do a

peace inflight tune
enemy nearby
battle

for each different group. I did terran, aera, and maybe one more, and kind of died off there. That's why everythign else uses the generic peace and battle tunes. (could be the reason for "themeless" feel) To refresh my memory, what were the factions and races? It's been a while..

Darn, it sucks cuz there's so much to do, and I can only spend so much time on it.. How many composers do we have on board? I think it's good to get together and delegate. Who's coordinating the sound/music dev? You?
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Post by klauss »

Factions: I don't know... too many... kklk, aera, rlaan, intelsec, forsaken, rlaan-briin, luddites, pirates, confed (military), bzbr, andolians, high born, hunters, mechanists, purists, unadorned, ISO, Shmrn... I may be forgetting some (or many).

So, per-faction is a no-no. But some factions could get their own tracks.

Races: three, mostly (human, aera, rlaan) are the important ones which can own sectors. There are also some other races that don't show up ingame (at least yet), like ancients, or others that don't own (that many) sectors: uln, for instance - I've never seen an uln system.

Oh: about coordinating and stuff,

chuck_starchaser and I have been the most active in the sound front. I intend to rewrite the soundsystem in VS, for instance. About the music, there's only one other person that I know that's composing: Zaydana. He wrote mission.ogg, for instance, and has a few others in the pipeline. You could talk to him to coordinate music composition, for chuck and I know nothing about composition (I do have my share of music knowledge, but I wouldn't dare to even try my hand at writing stuff - I suck - but I can interpret already written stuff, though).
And, for technical issues, or general brainstorming, chuck and I are your men.
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Post by jackS »

A thought (not to be confused with a decree ;-))-

Perhaps, before we continue generating music for the player to listen to (and therefore concern ourselves overly with thematic inclusion), it might be a worthwhile endeavor to experiment with compositions freed from that requirement that explore both how we see various groups from our development perspective and how they would "see themselves". Then, coming from both directions represented in said body of works, we could distill thematic elements, which only then we would attempt to place into a more constrained format suitable for repetition, subject to looping, etc. While there are many groups to consider here, the reduction in constraint (indeed, we need not even require creation of 'complete' works for each piece to be useful), makes it distinctly more manageable. Nor need all groups be equally represented, nor would subgroups from the same overarching culture likely be in need of separate treatment.

There is also, I believe, a useful place for low quality recordings - but I don't see a big demand for being able to tune into "local stations" while cruising through a system, so I don't see a dire need to populate said place with any urgency :).
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Post by klauss »

Well, jackS, that's in much more detail, what I referred to as "defining per-race or per-faction styles".
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Post by jackS »

klauss wrote:Well, jackS, that's in much more detail, what I referred to as "defining per-race or per-faction styles".
Well, in much detail, or in minimal, it's still something I'd like to see ;-)
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Post by klauss »

You were right to point that out. It is an important step in the process, and will, somewhat, become part of the universe, by musically defining the species.
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Post by hurleybird »

klauss wrote: chuck_starchaser and I have been the most active in the sound front. I intend to rewrite the soundsystem in VS, for instance. About the music, there's only one other person that I know that's composing: Zaydana. He wrote mission.ogg, for instance, and has a few others in the pipeline. You could talk to him to coordinate music composition, for chuck and I know nothing about composition (I do have my share of music knowledge, but I wouldn't dare to even try my hand at writing stuff - I suck - but I can interpret already written stuff, though).
And, for technical issues, or general brainstorming, chuck and I are your men.
I think PeteyG did some songs too.

If possible, I would like to get in on this as well. I have some basic knowledge with reason (which I hope to improve on). I have posted a very WIP example in the 'improved music thread' which, IMO, starts out good but goes downhill from there. In any case, I'd like to help in any way I can.
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Post by klauss »

Hurley: From my (very limited) experience, avoiding the downhill side is the part that really takes skill. It's about developing the idea you sketched in the first beats... you can not develop, and skip the downhill and touch bottom, or you can develop poorly, and just go downhill. Or... you can have skills, and never go downhill... up... up... and away!

I don't have those skills. I always ended up going downhill, so I gave up.
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Post by CoffeeBot »

Just a random thought, and while a failed musician myself (I can play gutiar, piano, and some drums..just not well enough to really go anywhere), has anyone thought of using another musical scale rather than the octave? One of my music teachers in HS played us some stuff done by a group who retuned their instruments into a 12-note scale which produced some unique sounds.

Since I don't know a whole lot of musical theory, I don't know how hard this kind of stuff is to accomplish. So, kick me out of this discussion if I'm asking the impossible ;) But, I would think that other species would have developed a different musical scale, hence my comment.

Just a thought. Again, kick me if I'm suggesting something insane.
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Post by Ryder P. Moses »

JackS: So, what, like torture a cat, record it, and have the game play that whenever you enter a Rlaan system?

The 'radio' thing would be kinda cool, properly implemented (possibly used GTA3-style as a way of delivering news and information of interest to the player), but it'd ultimately likely be more effort than it's worth. Hafta make several times as many sound tracks to do the job, for one thing.




I don't know that plain 'thematic' music would work so well unless the setting itself had stronger themes on a system-to-system basis. If you just have a drastic switch in musical styles with no obvious visual cue as to why it's changed it basically turns the music into a big flashing sign saying HELLO AERA COMING or HEY YOU'RE IN A FIGHT NOW, and that's just annoying. So unless there's a plan to ultimately make it so that stuff like the starfields, planets, etc. change dramatically based on who the primary occupants of a system are or whether it's a warzone or whatever, I'd shy away from making the music too obviously different from faction to faction. If that's not going to happen... well, difference is good, but the differences should be subtle to match the subtle distinctions between different star systems.


Oh, one thing with the music as it stands though, though. Could you please make something to alternate in usage for the "alienrockelectro" track? It's all I ever hear in fights, ever, and it's starting to wear on me. Partly, again, because it clashes so violently with the other music ingame.
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Post by kensuguro »

of course, it's always interesting to use non-chromatic scales.. it doesn't even have to have scales. The song can be made of a collection of atonal sounds for that matter. And it wouldn't be at all strange if some alien civilization went that way with their music. (if the have ears)

Anyway, from here, I think it's important we figure out just what kind of songs a "set" is going to have, and how many different "sets" we're going to need. Again, at the basic level, I think we'll need the inflight, rising tension and battle tunes.. (at minimum) But for which factions? Which race?

One idea would be to create something like 5 sets, ranging from 1 being most negative, 3 being neutral, and 5 being most positive. Then, the server can choose which set to use depending on your standing against a certain race or whoever it is that's being dealt with at the time. That way, we don't have to be too specific as to which race goes with which set. Also, it would leave enough room to allow for the player to shift in political standing. Does the game allow that by the way?

From there, we can also do some "exception" sets, where a certain set is tied to a specific race, if the race is comes up alot, or is a major player in the game's universe. (I'm not at all sure who they are) But we should concentrate on getting the basic 5 sets to work in highest quality before we think about working on the exceptions.

In terms of composer delegation, I think it might be best to have a composer do a whole set, as opposed to several composers working on once set. Easiest way to have different "feels" and textures for different set would be to have different people writing them in the first place.

Then, we can send all our completed wav files to Klauss (or whoever) to master and make final adjustments. 44.1k 16bit minimum, more is fine. No clipping of course, and also no extreme compression of any sort. The mastering guy's going to take the hardest hit in a production like this since there's going to be so many people and so many different styles.. Someone VERY dedicated should do this. I don't have that kind of time on my hands.

Sounds like a plan? First thing, which race do you think deserves their own sets? Also, what would be that race's characteristic? (not in a musical sense, but in terms of cultural background or behavioral trait )

BTW, I'm uploading the wav files for the current music. Should be done in a couple of hours.
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Post by hurleybird »

kensurgo:

Heres the way that I envision the new music should work:

First off, music is divided into 3 catagories. Locational, situational, and ambient. The bulk of the music would be ambient, with locational or situational music coming in when triggered.

Ambient music has a number of things going for it. It's relativley easy to transition to and from ambient to either locational or situational by doing a simple fade in or fade out. Ambient music also conveys the emptiness, coldness, and atmosphere of being in deep space. Furthermore, its effectivly non-repeditive, and any locational or situational music that is played benefits from this as well. Also, the change from very minimilistic ambient sounds into music is more emotional than from going to one song to the other. Of course, the ambient music would also change in intensity and mood based on some situational or locational variables (for example, the further away form civilization you are, the darker, omnius, and colder the music becomes. The ambience becomes more cacophonic the more damged your ship is, and more frantic as you get closer to enemy territoy) in order to slowly build emotions like apprehension.

The situational music would consist of things like battle music, or specialized music for certain situations. Different races have different situational music for various circumstances.

Locational music would come into effect only when a player is an a certain location. Bars would have their own music, and you might have music for other areas of interest as well. Objects like starbases and planets would have their own music as players got closer to them, and even an encounter with another races space ship might trigger music with different music corresponding to the amount of ships you meet. For example, if you encountered 40 aeran ships, war like music would play. In some ways, their would be some shared area between situational and locational music. In fact, you might even be able to group them both into 'non-ambient' and leave it like that.




As for factions that should have their own music, I think they should all have their own music. However, very minor factions might only have three or four soungs, while a major one might have fourteen or tweenty. Besides Rlaan, Aeran, and generic terrain, I think mechanists, highborn, ISO, pirates, retro and shapers absolutly NEED to have their own music. As it stands there is not much distinguishing the various human factions; they all seem to be one and the same. Factions like mechansits and shapers could have some interesting songs too.
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Post by Ryder P. Moses »

That's, what, around 85 distinct factional music clips alone, just for those few groups? Ow.


The 'ambient music' is more what I was talking about- music should reflect what's actually happening to the player and basically serve as an audio backdrop to what he's seeing; using music as a way of communicating the current galactopolitical situation seems kinda secondary to me.
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Post by Wisq »

I tend to agree there. Maybe factional music (and graphics?) for planet base screens, and combat, and more ambient factional music when flying around a heavily-patrolled sector... but personally, I prefer my in-flight music to be mostly "secular". Didn't matter how many "Aera sector" tracks I added for variety -- it got annoying very fast.

(I also tend to like my space music to be much more ambient than what VS has right now, FYI. Space to me should be somewhat lonely, albeit not oppressive like when I had no music at all. Low-key, moments of silence, etc. I found the Star Control 2 space music quite appropriate, both for SC2 and for VS.)
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Post by kensuguro »

let's try to keep the workload at a realistic level here... there's no way we're going to complete that many songs and still have a feeling of continuity and also bare necessity quality control.. I mean, I believe we have some composers here, but "some" isn't going to be enough if we went with 14 songs for each faction..

But you do have a point in that the music will get boring once you hear it for the 300th time. You'd have memorized the song better than the composer by that time. So, I think the trick is to find a way to create a "sense" of variety, and the best one I can think of right now is to go multi-track.

Let's say you have a set of tracks that play a certain chord progression, at a certain tempo. Call that set 1. Then, create set2 with the same progression, same tempo, but with different ambience. Maybe do set3. Then, you end up with 3 sets of tracks that are interchangeable to a certain degree.

I've done a similar project for an interactive installation once.. we ended up with something like 6 tracks, or more like "groups". (more than that it gets too confusing and mucky) So, 3 sets of 6 tracks doing same progression, same tempo. Let's call this the "atmospheric" soundtrack collection.

Depending on where you are, you may get track 1 of set 1, track2 of set3, track3 of set2, and so on. You may even get only 3 out of 6 tracks if it's a sparcely populated area. Anyway, it gives you variation with less work than doing 14 different songs.

Still, it's worth thinking of other solutions because 3sets of 6tracks for just one collection, for just one faction! We'll certainly be needing more composers. I for one will only have enough time to barely contribute.

Actually, before we start on anything, who composes here? I think it's good to know who is comfortable with composing in what style. Then we can kind of figure out what styles we can choose from when we figure out the faction styles. Not that the faction styles have to fall within the available styles of the composers, but just so that we all have an idea of what's vaguely possible and what's rigidly impossible.

Well, y'all probably know more than enough about my stuff by now. Some electro, a bit of industrial, orchestral, and then the new-age-ish ambient stuff. I also did all the singing parts whether you like it or not. Thought it'd add to the atmosphere. I'm fairly literate in the craft, as I've been trained in it for quite some time, although limited in the digital arts realm. (so, no traditional training)

So, on with the list. Or any other ideas welcome. Let's all warm up some ideas before we get to work.
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Post by jackS »

partially tangential to the above - but what I was suggesting earlier today was to embark, prior to the construction of new release quality material, on an exploration of musical flavors to associate with interesting groups (focusing on abbreviated and otherwise partial compositions - just enough to gesture in the direction of an associated piece). The purpose of such not being to lead to finished pieces for each group, but to be able to consider the range over which binding thematic elements may be desired to be applied to.

As for multi-tracking, this seems a reasonable approach, especially for "ambient" (not associated with specific events or locales) music. This will, however, require that tracks deemed compatible truly are.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

I've mentioned this topic before, but Kensaguro was not around at the time, and I can't find that post now, so I'll just write this again. Relates to microtonal music. What our ears report to our brains as "musical" is not just any frequency ratios ("intervals" -so called in musical jargon) but specifically rational numbers, such as 1.25, 1.333..., 1.5, but NOT 1.4142, or the square root of 2, an irrational number. However our ears are forgiving, and 1.4142 is right between two rational numbers: 7/5 and 10/7.
Our modern, atempered scale, based on powers of the twelfth root of two (all irrational numbers) is basically a corruption of the Pythagorean scale. Not that I'm upholding Pythagoras, though... Pythagoras did not believe in using prime numbers higher than 2 or 3, so his scale only involved fractions between powers of 2 and 3:
1, 4/3, 3/2, 9/8, 16/9... His Major 3rd was 81/64. The Catholic Church adopted the Pythagorean scale and basically had to fight a war with musicians in Middle Ages who preferred to use 5/4 for the Major 3rd.

In Ancient Greece, however, there were 7 scales based on their own numbers:

11 Dorian
12 Phrygian
13 Lydian
14 Hypodorian
16 Hypophrygian
18 Hypolydian
20 Mixolydian

And each scale had two counterparts: Harmonic and Modal. The Harmonic notes have increasing numerators; the modal notes have decreasing denominators.
So, for example, the Dorian scale went like:

Harmonic Dorian:
1, 12/11, 13/11, 14/11, 16/11, 18/11, 20/11 and 22/11 or 2 or "the octave".

Modal Dorian:
1, 11/10, 11/9, 11/8, 11/7, 22/13, 11/6, 2

Classic Indian music included as many as 104 official scales (scales sanctioned by the Vedas). The Indian scales were not, like the Greek scales, based on one number. The Indian system has 66 notes in a single octave. Some of these ratios (shrutis) have 3-digit numerator and denominator. I once had a translation of the Vedic descriptions of many shrutis, and I got curious how they'd describe the Pythagorean versus the Gaelic Major Thirds.
81/64 they described as the rising Sun, whereas 5/4 they described as moving forward, or taking a first step in a jurney. I listened to the two ratios and the descriptions seemed quite fitting. 81/64 is a bit sharp of the present, atempered major 3rd. 5/4 is slightly flat from it.
Anyhow, the 104 Classical Indian scales were all seemingly random collections out of these 66 shrutis.

The reason I'm bringing all this up is that the most likely distinction between the musics of different races would be the scale chosen. I don't think if there's 10,000 advanced civilizations in our galaxy, even one other one would have picked a scale as horrendous as the one we have, in modern times, based on irrational numbers.
And if we were to pick one scale for each race, we might even have a lot of songs call for the same notes, but just use a different tuning for each race.

The one book to get, for those interested in this subject, is Harry Partch's "Genesis of a Music". Harry Partch built his own instruments to be able to play ancient scales, as well as newly designed scales. He had 46 notes in his octave, and had modified a piano such that the entire keyboard only spanned one and a half octaves...
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Post by klauss »

Hurleybird: funnily enough, almost exactly what you say is done and in CVS. I'm lacking content, actually, to propperly populate the playlists. Let me transcribe the hierarchy:
The Playlists wrote:
  • battle
    • aera/AWACS/iso/rlaan/etc... (per faction group - configurable)
    peace
    • around_sig (you're near a significant unit: base/planet)
      • per faction group
      away (you're in open space)
      • two sets, but I want to add a third, per faction group
        • friend: you're in friendly territory
        • hostile: you're in hostile territory
        • neutral: (not present, I want to add it)
    threat (when hostiles are around, but not attacking you)
    • per faction group
There's also a panic list, which is when you're in battle and badly damage: ie, loosing. Again, per faction group.

Basically, everything ends up in a per faction group entry, which means there's a playlist for each faction group (that is, confed, kklk, this and that could be grouped and be using the same playlist).

So, playlists define moods, more or less, which are within "mood groups" (paceful/threat/battle, for instance). Playlists may contain whatever selection of tracks we see fit. We can share tracks among playlists, or we can specify a unique set of tracks. Even, although this is not working particularly well ATM, we can add "weights" to tracks, to define the probability of them being selected for playback at random. In fact, I want to make playlists a full sequencing definition that defines the way tracks can be sequenced, with transitions and all.

That's the already coded mechanism - only missing the neat stuff (sequencing constraints).
A lot can be done with it, but it can be expanded if necessary.

Also, multiple tracks can be played at once already. The dj_lib (the code responsible for sequencing playlists) doesn't support it yet, but it may be done easily, since the engine (the music manager) already supports it (it's just a matter of finding out how to define "multitrack playlists".

I can take care of mastering the content produced (if by that you mean creating the .ogg files, normalizing levels, and all the usual postprocessing, plus inserting them ingame in the appropriate place, etc...).
Oíd mortales, el grito sagrado...
Call me "Menes, lord of Cats"
Wing Commander Universe
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