Transmorph music to represent change in mood?

I remember a long time ago when playing phantasy star online how awesome the music was.
But there was a particular feature I really admired with the music and that was how it transitioned between battle and normal moods rather seemlessly. It almost felt procedural.

Is there some way to do this? and is there an industry standard term for it?

 

Hi, the industry term for this is "adaptive music". There are several "methods" to write/implement music in such a way that you can have it behave/react/change in relation to game parameters. Depending on your needs, writing such pieces of music is, as you might have a guessed, a lot more difficult than writing "regular" linear tracks. You can find more info on the topic online searching for "adaptive music". Winifred Phillips has a couple of interesting blog posts on Gamasutra as well as talks on Youtube. Finally, here's a nice video about the adaptive music system of adaptive/dynamic fight music of "Remember Me":

 

Good post and reply! Thanks for the info. Sort of off topic but very on topic to my Environment Sound Generator idea for Unity, is there a good way to metronome these sounds and or instruments/music to sync together? This would seem essential to the seemless transition...yes?

 

Not sure I can follow. Could you elaborate a little more detailed maybe :]?

 

An easy example of a game series with dynamic tracks is The Legend of Zelda.

As far back as Ocarina of Time, Zelda games have had musical tracks that adapt to the situation, particularly in the overworld/field areas:

Ocarina's Hyrule Field theme works by patching together different phrases that can be played in virtually any order and still sound fluid. The trick is that whether the player character is moving or standing still, whether the sun is rising or setting, and whether an enemy is attacking all factor into which modular phrase is queued to play next.

Similar systems have also been seen in Wind Waker and Skyward Sword.

In general, there are a few ways to create the effect, probably the simplest of which is a layering technique. Try writing a song that provides a sufficient feeling of energy appropriate to the scene it will be used in, but render certain groups of instruments (melody, bass, percussion) as separate tracks. Play them all at the same time in your project, and selectively attenuate specific tracks to adapt to the mood. Skyward Sword uses a bit of this along with the modular technique described before.

Another way to change the music to fit the scene is to create cue points to progress a song along with something in the game. For example, a driving yet low-energy track is played and looped at the beginning of a tutorial, and as the player learns how to play effectively, the song is allowed to progress to the next part which is slightly more exciting and loop there instead. Eventually, the player has learned everything and is pushed into full gameplay, and the music transitions into the full version of the track for the first level. This idea could also be used for a multi-part mini game, or maybe a multi-tiered boss fight.

I suppose a track could also be generated in real time, though there's a lot more theory that will go into that.

There's no reason why you couldn't use some combination of these. It's been mentioned already that probably the most difficult part of this will be writing the tracks to allow for dynamic phrasing, etc, as it will be pretty different from normal composing.