One thing I wonder about .. he mentions CD-audio (Redbook?) as being one capability of the system. But the CD-Audio games like X-Wing vs Tie Fighter were much more limited in that sense. You'd literally just hear the music switch to the new track. And the Force Unleashed, the last game that used iMuse, wasn't particularly remarkable if memory serves. I wonder if that was a limitation they just couldn't quite make as seamless?
I figure today you could do it, with a "virtual MIDI" system using MP3 audio of individual instrument sounds ..
Edited to add: that last sentence is essential what a DAW provides.
Modern games have similar reactive music systems but I've never heard one I felt was better than X-Wing's. They got it right on the first try.
This gave the series a leg up in that the music could actually communicate information effectively -- a tense moment, the shifting tide of the battle, the calm after a victory -- whereas other games simply had to put up waveforms that sounded pleasing.
To be fair many games experimented with sound design in this era, but few had such legendary IP to build with. An unfair advantage to say the least. The folks wielding iMUSE clearly knew what they had.
MIDI isn't really that much better, though - it's a compatibility-centric protocol, so it doesn't get at the heart of the issue with dynamic audio of "how do I coordinate this". All it is responsible for is an abstract "channel, patch number, event" system, leaving the details involved in coordinating multiple MIDI sequences and triggering appropriate sounds to be worked out in implementation. An implementation that does everything a DAW does with MIDI sequences has to also implement all the DSP effects and configuration surfaces, which is out of scope for most projects, although FMOD does enable something close to that.
I think the best approach for exploring dynamic and interactive right now is really to make use of systems that allow for live coding - Pure Data, Supercollider, etc. These untangle the principal assumptions of "either audio tracks or event sequences" and allow choice, making it more straightforward to coordinate everything centrally, do some synthesis or processing, some sequencing, adopt novel methods of notation. The downside is that these are big runtimes with a lot of deployment footprint, so they aren't something that people just drop into game engines.
iMUSE was used for some really beautiful music in its time, so LucasArts had this figured out. But I'd be curious to learn how they did it.
riotnrrd•3h ago