Mezzo: An Adaptive, Real-Time Composition Program for Game Soundtracks

Mezzo is a computer program designed that procedurally writes Romantic-Era style music in real-time to accompany computer games. Leitmotivs are associated with game characters and elements, and mapped into various musical forms. These forms are distinguished by different amounts of harmonic tension and formal regularity, which lets them musically convey various states of markedness which correspond to states in the game story. Because the program is not currently attached to any game or game engine, “virtual” gameplays were been used to explore the capabilities of the program; that is, videos of various game traces were used as proxy examples. For each game trace, Leitmotivs were input to be associated with characters and game elements, and a set of ‘cues’ was written, consisting of a set of time points at which a new set of game data would be passed to Mezzo to reflect the action of the game trace. Examples of music composed for one such game trace, a scene from Red Dead Redemption, are given to illustrate the various ways the program maps Leitmotivs into different levels of musical markedness that correspond with the game state.  Mezzo is a computer program designed by the author that procedurally writes Romantic-Era-style music in real time to accompany computer games. It was motivated by the desire for game music to be as rich and expressive as that written for traditional media such as opera, ballet, or film, while still being procedurally generated, and thus able to adapt to a variety of dramatic situations. To do this, it models deep theories of musical form and semiotics in Classical and Romantic music. Characters and other important game elements like props and environmental features are given Leitmotivs, which are constantly rearranged and developed throughout gameplay in ways  Story states that occur in a game are musically conveyed by employing or withholding normative musical features. This creates various states of markedness, a concept which is defined in semiotic terms as a valuation given to difference (Hatten 1994). An unmarked state or event is one that conveys normativity, while an unmarked one conveys deviation from or lack of normativity. A succession of musical sections that passes through varying states of markedness and unmarkedness, producing various trajectories of expectation and fulfillment, tension and release, correlates with the sequence of episodes that makes up a game story’s structure. Mezzo uses harmonic tension and formal regularity as its primary vehicles for musically conveying markedness; it is constantly adjusting the values of these features in order to express states of the game narrative. Motives are associated with characters, and markedness with game conditions. These two independent associations allow each coupling of a motive with a level of markedness to be interpreted as a pair of coordinates in a state space (a “semiotic square”), where various regions of the space correspond to different expressive musical qualities (Grabócz 2009). Certain patterns of melodic repetition combined with harmonic function became conventionalized in the Classical Era as normative forms, labeled the sentence, period, and sequence (Caplin 1998, Schoenberg 1969). These forms exist in the middleground of a musical work, each comprising one or several phrase repetitions and one or a small number of harmonic cadences. Each musical form has a normative structure, and various ways in which it can be deformed by introducing irregular amounts of phrase repetition to make the form asymmetrical. Mezzo’s expressive capability comes from the idea that there are different perceptible levels of formal irregularity that can be quantitatively measured, and that these different levels convey different levels of markedness.  Papers from the 2012 AIIDE Workshop AAAI Technical Report WS-12-16