Sound in games

I had never really considered music in games to be all the important and for a long time designers seemed to think so too, the music track simply being plunked into a level giving nothing to the beat or flow of the game.

That was'nt until i played the original Call of Duty theres a specific level that tasks you with manning an artillery cannon and destroying a series of incoming tanks as the flow of tanks ever increases and the game becomes more and more frantic a steady orchesteral score is introduced increasing not only in granduer but also in volume so by the time the tanks are piling up you can barely hear the weapoons fire.

What striked me about it was not the sudden introduction of the music but the way i did'nt notice it until it was over, the sudden silence making more of an impact upon me than the actual score,

Rather than games simply following linear forms of narrative such as films where the changing events trigger a score change i think games have to try something a bit more dynamic, games are by there very nature non-linear so trying to force an approach to music that is suited to the linear, pre-defined world of film is a bit foolish. However go back far enough and this simply did'nt matter the old 16 bit platformers of yore presented the player with a level the player working there way from left to right until they reached the end where the next stage was loaded, the choice of music was reflected in the type of stage if it was an egyptian looking level Egyptian inspired music would start to play and so on this music would play much like the level in a linear fashion from beginning to end, you could backtrack but what would be the point? There were enemies up ahead.

Also due to there technical limitations the music and sound effects of the time could only playback primitve midi tunes, this gave them a distinctive sound signature so thats part of why if you were to play the Super Mario Bros it would instantly register as a piece of videogame music.

Jump foward to the 90's and the advent of the cd-rom and faster processor speeds meants sound could be reproduced in much higher fidelity and was more akin to movies - but instead of epic sweeping orchestral music or even a soundtrack in suiting with the style and charecter of the game they swamped them with trashy dance mixes i don't care if sony made gaming 'cool' with the playstation by dumping it in nightclubs and slapping *shudder* 'clubland hits' into the games it just made them shallow, two dimensional - gamings equivalent of MTV. The music did'nt reflect the game or the mood the games were trying to set. It was like rolling past idlyic awe inspiring hills with some boy racers mix tape blaring over the top - grr rant over

Anywho jump foward to the nowish and sound and additionally the music in games is taken alot more seriously, designers now realising that using a linear form of audo presentation simply dosen't work for all games mixing in dynamic music that shifts between action and dynamic reflecting the events in the game and also relying on prescipted events such as a boss fight to further emotionalise the action