Musical Scenes & Themes

Samples of sound/music, ideas or suggestions related to the development of audio assets for FreeOrion.
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StratCaster
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Musical Scenes & Themes

#1 Post by StratCaster »

"thus far I've been working under the assumption I would probably wind up supplying most of the music for the game."
From viewtopic.php?p=5299#5299

Not sure if that post is still relevant or not, but I have an idea on how to involve the community in more of the writing process. Or put another way (no offense to LithiumMongoose) to make it other than just a one or two man show.

I have already heard a lot of work, and more than most of it is great. The one thing it lacks is direction. Not that it should have lots of direction in these early stages of development. And one could argue that scoring for FO at this time is way premature and could in fact, be started after 90% of the development is done. But where's the fun in that?

SCENES
From the Audio section of the FreeOrionWiki:
“Currently, there is no specific list of things for which music tracks or sound effects are needed. Until elements like game races, combat mechanics, and user-interface design are pinned down, people are pretty much free to create and submit whatever they like (or think might be useful).”

So, obviously its premature to start writing tracks for anything specific. But I find it helps me to focus my writing when I have something in mind. I think it'd be a good idea to start a rough draft of musical 'scenes' that could be adapted when the elements in the game are defined.

Perhaps everyone could contribute and someone can organize a master rough draft somewhere in the FreeOrionWiKi?

I've already seen a couple of these out there...
i.e:
[Short musical pieces]
Generic: Space Combat Victory, Combat Defeat,
Combat Ambiguous, Discover New World,
Discover New Tech, Impending Bombardment,
Result of Combat (ground), Spy Attack,
Spy Captured, Espionage

Race Selection, Achieve & Fail Sounds :
Human
Insectiod
Warrior Race
Robot/Cyborg Race
Smart/Peaceful Race

[Long musical pieces]
Ambient game music (this could be 10 tunes in itself)
Combat (background)
Cinematic (???)
Ending (more than one?)
Credits
Game Menus
Intro


THEMES
As far as spreading the writing around...What about introducing motives and themes. Not like previous posts mentioned. i.e. Lets say: Humans have one particular motif that is: DO,RE,MI,DO (obviously it would be more than this).

Different writers could take that theme/motive and arrange a tune around it. They could use the theme/motive directly, vary it, shorten it, change its modality, make it happy, sad, ominus, play it backwards, whatever... and it can be used for anything: Menus, Diplomacy, Special Events, Tech Breakthrough, Founding a new Colony, Victory, Failure etc...the list goes on.

I think this would give a sense of contiguity (or one mind behind the music). People can be creative with different instrumentation and musical styles etc... I have read some helpful tips that LithuimMongoose has already mentioned: "I would recommend a variety of styles and genres depending on the race. An empire of lizards ala Saakra should have drums, exotic sounds, maybe some warhorns like Star Trek Klingon music. An empire of elves should sound very passionate and stoic and moving, maybe go classical with deep choir here. An empire of humans should be some combination of techno..." Great ideas, I think we should make it official, or at least write it down somewhere where people can look to it to assist in their writing.

So how would this theme idea be accomplished?.. not sure... maybe LithuimMongoose would choose themes...what is the current approval process, is there any?

Another thing that'd be good to have in a central location would be a list of users and their contributions. This way people can hear/see whats been done to get ideas or add to it or write something that hasn't been done.

In summation...I'm not trying to derail what's currently going on or am I trying to say that the current system isn't working. I just think from a community member's (a new one at that) perspective, a couple things could be organized in a way that would help give some structure to this whole scoring Free Orion endeavor...which is a pretty cool thing by the way.

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#2 Post by LithiumMongoose »

Okay, first of all, feel free to call me just 'Lithium' or 'Mongoose', if you ever feel like typing less. :)

Oy, what a post hehe. Your first quote is indeed probably not so relevant anymore; admittedly music contributions are still pretty scarce, but Guiguibaah is showing promise, and I won't be surprised to see a flood of interest in all areas of the game following the v0.3 "going public" release.

I am neither for nor against a "one or two man show." I do think life is a lot simpler, and the overall results better, the fewer ppl there are actively involved, moreso for music than other areas since it's such a personal artistic/creative process. On the other hand I'll be the first to admit I'm no Uematsu, Williams, or Beethoven, and as such want to remain as open as I can to other ppl's work, ideas, and general assistance.

I am of the opinion that lots of direction right now would indeed be counterproducive, or at least not terribly helpful. I personally have not dabbled with the stuff in your "short musical pieces" list much yet, because most of it is highly dependant on what races wind up in the game. We really can't say anything for certain other than that Humans will exist, even in your general terms, at the moment. Believe me I'm very anxious myself to get the races finalized. It is also not at all clear yet, for example, how much of the sound effects and music will be tied to race; a lot of the stuff in your Generic list probably just needs a simple fanfare that all races play. But by all means, feel free to write and submit fanfare-type things. :)

My attention has been on the stuff in your "long musical pieces list" thus far, as these are basic game elements that are guaranteed to be around later, and are more important anyway precisely because they are long (ie they will make up 95% of what goes into the user's ears over the course of a game-playing session).

Your list is basically solid, but I would make a few changes. The main categories I see right now are: TITLE SCREEN, GALAXY MAP, COMBAT, CINEMATICS, and CREDITS. Intro and Ending would almost certainly themselves be cinematics, so I roll them into that category. I thought this was rather obvious to anyone familiar with space-type strategy games, so I didn't articulate it formally before. Sorry.

On themes: themes are good. But they are not essential or required. What you're describing is basically Wagner-style leitmotif, and it is one very valid way to go, but not the only way. It is entirely possible to have a collection of tracks that use the same instruments and evoke the same feeling or response while having no specific melodic or harmonic content in common... Starcraft's three Terran pieces for example. So I'm not going to recommend the theme approach over any other, but if people want to do that, more power to you, I might even jump on the bandwagon myself if I like it enough. :)

(Since you brought it up though, I do have a short little motif I've been using a lot in my work so far. It's turning out to be more of a game-wide thing than a race-specific thing for me, but feel free to use it if you want. For want of a better description, 1 2 3 2 of equal duration, usually quarter notes or whole notes, "DO RE MI RE" I guess you'd call it. AI uses the slight variation 1 2 3 7 in its first section; Encounter uses it and the 2 3 2 1 variation as well as the vertically-inverted 2 1 7 1, then takes up 3 1 7 1 in the voice part; Legend uses it in the opening strings with the octave bouncing, then goes to 3 2 1 2 with a different rhythm in the meat-and-potatoes second half; Story Battle in the slow B section; Sword of Stars uses 3 2 1 4 which I'm honestly not so thrilled with; and the new Tension follows 1 2 3 2 religiously.)

I will post guidelines like what you quoted for race-specific music when we have races to work with, right now I'm just using MOO archetypes, AI for example was conceived as a Cynoid/Meklar galaxy map track.

Eventually yes I'll use the Wiki to keep track of users and their contributions. But right now it's mostly me and somewhat Gui, and our two respective threads cover it pretty well. (There are other contributions floating around, yes, but no one else has done more than one or two pieces so far and they haven't been active in quite a while either.)

Personally I'm a fan of and staunch believer in benevolent dictatorships, so I will be exercising as much control as I can over what ultimately gets used, where, and how. Obviously the other team leads have some minor insignificant say in the matter (evil laughter), and public outcry along the lines of "Mongoose should be burned at the stake, mmm roast mongoose for supper..." will be appeased. Not sure if that's what you meant by "current approval process"; if you're just talking about music content, I'm not getting picky yet. For the foreseeable future, everyone is encouraged to come up with whatever they want for any aspect of music for the game.

I *am* concerned about integration in the final product, ie avoiding it coming out sounding like a cauldron a bunch of ppl just threw their own independent works into and praying it meshed. For this reason I do still want to see almost everything produced by the same person using the same synths at the end, and am tentatively planning on me being the one who does it, but, we'll see, this is highly subject to change; Gui for example has demonstrated a rather impressive synth arsenal lately and I'm trying to avoid feeling humbled by it. :)

Again, expect some guidelines out of me once we have races mostly down is the main thing I guess. Oh yeah, and at the moment there's probably only about three of my own pieces I'm really in love with (AI, Legend, Tension, and the latter two still need work). If we were releasing FO v1.0 tomorrow, those are the only ones I'd insist on including, really. So there is still *plenty* of room left for ppl to work with, to put it mildly.

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#3 Post by StratCaster »

LithiumMongoose wrote:On themes: themes are good. But they are not essential or required. What you're describing is basically Wagner-style leitmotif, and it is one very valid way to go, but not the only way. It is entirely possible to have a collection of tracks that use the same instruments and evoke the same feeling or response while having no specific melodic or harmonic content in common... Starcraft's three Terran pieces for example. So I'm not going to recommend the theme approach over any other, but if people want to do that, more power to you, I might even jump on the bandwagon myself if I like it enough. :)
yes, they definitely not essential or required. All I meant was that adding themes to races would add a richness for the user to identify with.

When I think of the Zerg, all I think of is the voice over sounds, which give a powerful image. But, if I hear the Imperial theme from Star Wars, the picture I conjour up in my head is much richer. Now, I know its not fair to compare a movie like Star Wars, but I think you know what I mean.

And it doesn't really work unless people are onboard with it, because someones Sakkra tune may be very different from the next person's.

I'm not trying to win a debate or anything. I'm merely suggesting a way to get more people involved...like myself. :)

I know I can write something and submit it anytime. But I didn't want to write 'any old thing' and submit it. I wanted it to mean something. I would like to put music to some sort of an image, no matter how vague. I realize its not that practical at this time so I just offered a way of focusing people's writing in the meantime. I thought things could easily be adapted later, or worse case, we don't use some tunes... and write new ones.

It's not that big of a deal, it was just a suggestion.

I also want to fall in line of whats already been done. I mean, I could have a wild imagination and come up with some disco tech tune for a splinter colony of humans that populate a world stuck in the 70's! hmm what would their war vessels look like?
"The mighty warships of the Vl'Hurg Empire dived screaming upon the unknowing Earth, where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog." -Hitchhikers Guide

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interesting reply

#4 Post by guiguibaah »

Interesting discussion - (and it reminds me I should fix up the midis so others can fix / fool around with them. :) )

As for the Do-Re-Mi-Do idea, I did do something ilke that with the Trageyyadora songs - At first I tried to compose tunes that were instrument specific (for example, the Trag have lowgrade brass, while the Tusk tune is heavy on drums and low end percussion)

Although, on the flip side, when Fred ford and Paul Reiche put out the internet request for tunes for SC2, they got a whole bunch of different submissions all individually distinct from different composers (Dan Richeston, Riku, etc) to earn them Gamespot's top 10 on game music.

Oh, and speaking of which, if you're a star control 2 buff, you'll probably like this site :) I really like the the Ur-Quan remix.

http://www.medievalfuture.com/precursors/
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#5 Post by StratCaster »

yes, I agree different styles from different composers is a good thing.

and that's right, those Trag tunes you wrote were done well. They all had similar rhythms with different tempos. They seemed like variations on a theme. You knew you were listening to another Trag piece. And that Tragloss...I loved that french horn line at the beginning...

btw, is Trageyyadora an actual race name for FO? I do not recognize it.

hey, that Star Control 2 site is cool. I never played SC2, I just played SC3 and loved it, great story line...
"The mighty warships of the Vl'Hurg Empire dived screaming upon the unknowing Earth, where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog." -Hitchhikers Guide

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#6 Post by Aquitaine »

SC2 is infinitely better than SC3. Download it here:

http://sc2.sourceforge.net
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#7 Post by LithiumMongoose »

The Trageyyadora are one of a number of proposed race ideas that have come up in the "Story" forum. Gui decided to grab that particular one and run with it. :)

Now the Roadmap says v0.8 will be when we lock in the game's races. Aq then said in chat they may be semi-finalized somewhat before then, but not a lot before. So in short we'll be waiting a while.

It is certain Humans will exist, it's just not clear what "kind" of humans we're talking about, there are lots of different takes on that: Star Trek has future humanity being pretty much all benevolent and peaceful explorers; MOO has them being savvy diplomats and traders with MOO2 putting an emphasis on 'honorable' while MOO3 with the Russian avatar guy made no such claims; and I seem to recall something different still being planned for FO in talking with Tyreth many months ago. Obviously this will affect the kind of music they ultimately get, but, if you want to start tackling human music now we could probably go ahead and give them a theme. Just a thought. :)

Oh yeah, and Gui has an interesting "human battle" track already that might be a good starting point, but it's pretty standard orchestration -- strings and drums -- til the end where the sine wave and voice kick in; ideally I'd like to see more of a techno/industrial style for our humans.

@Gui -- You *sure* there's no way I could get access to some of your great synths? Am particularly interested in how you did the awesome vocal line at the end of humanbattle. :-)

Mmm, perhaps letting anybody with really good synths like this produce their own stuff is the best way to go afterall. I'm very curious to see how the end result of such a collaborative effort works out. On that note, as I've said before, if either of you want midi's of any of my stuff to work with, just let me know; it'll take a bit of effort to teach LlamaWare how to export midi files but if there's interest I'll be happy to do it.

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Human battle

#8 Post by guiguibaah »

Actually the vocal bit at the end of humanbattle was something I stumbled upon while perusing the Creative Labs Demo compilations on their CD. There is a soundfont collection called "Bloodwar" meant to go with a musical compilation and I guess I just ran with it.


As for the Trag songs, one thing I was concerned about is that with the recent artwork by Obiwan and the songs I wrote for them, that they would suddenly get 'full approval' for whatever future race creation since the most artwork was done for them. Not that they're a bad design (Obiwan's artwork and their background story is nicely fleshed out) but one of the consequences could be (in the future) if we proceeded like this could be an uneven amount of a certain type of alien races without a certain balance. (EG: 6 warrior races living on swamps, 2 humanoid and 1 cybernetic)...


I think Stratcaster raised a good issue, that it is easier to conceptualize music / artwork / etc once the ideas are fleshed out - but then again, those ideas could be in another year, so until then, at best we can keep goofing around and such, improving our talents, etc....






(read the below with caution)

What I'm using right now is the KX drivers for my soundblaster (they are hard to get used to, but they allow for a lot more DSP effects than the standard creative ones.). Into that is patched an old roland LAPC-1 (it spans the entire length of my computer case) for legacy synths like square waves, polysynths, etc) and for nice quality samples I went and bought Gigastudio, which is software renditioned synths (although I don't have much because .gigs cost a fortune and eat up system resources like a starving lion at a Linux convention - although you can find some freeware ones on the internet). I also use an XG midi software synth I got on my final fantasy 7 cd quite a bit. :). I have a microphone hooked up for my partner to sing into, but haven't posted anything of those yet. After that, I send the info out via SPDIF to my other machine, which has a Home Studio Pro 64 hooked up for recording and final Midi touches. I find that adding an EQ bandpass that's heavy on the +10k range makes the samples sound crisper, and then adding reverb to that (and not vice versa). Of course, some samples are by nature somewhat fuzzy, so if you can run an noise filter on them, you'll end up cleaning some fuzziness...

Hope that didn't bore you to death.




(I also have a cooty glider song as well, but haven't posted it yet or other for that reason).

Oh, and Fie on whomever said they haven't played SC2.
Last edited by guiguibaah on Tue Jul 27, 2004 11:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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#9 Post by Sandlapper »

The Trayeggadora is one of the races I created, and proposed to the story thread. As stated above, nothing is official yet. Obiwan took a liking to this race, apparently, and produced this outstanding image:

viewtopic.php?t=383&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15

I think this helped inspire Gui to pen a few notes to help polish this race's characture. I greatly appreciate both of their endeavors in regard to improving this races look and individuallity. Hopefully this race will make the final cut for FO.

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#10 Post by StratCaster »

playing SC2 as we speak... great just when I thought I had some free time this summer to write...

That Tray pic rocks! very creative...

Now there's an idea... write stuff that goes to whatever the graphics forum puts out... That should inspire some creativity....

and btw, Gui, I'm all for goofing around and improving my talent...I am certainly in no rush. I would think that there is going to be a lot of trial and error anyhow. I figure a lot of stuff will be thrown out... once the look/mood/and feel of the game is born, the music that is written today may not fit... or by then, we'll at least want to show off our new talent ;)
"The mighty warships of the Vl'Hurg Empire dived screaming upon the unknowing Earth, where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog." -Hitchhikers Guide

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Studio

#11 Post by StratCaster »

hey Gui, nice arsenal you have going there... I heard Giga works a lot better on an a seperate machine, if you can get your hands on one.

I use Garritan Personal Orchestra, KONTAKT, Reason and a Roland JV-1010. GPO has some decent samples, and Reason's Orkester sound lib is pretty nice.
"The mighty warships of the Vl'Hurg Empire dived screaming upon the unknowing Earth, where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog." -Hitchhikers Guide

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#12 Post by LithiumMongoose »

@Gui -- No it didn't bore me to death at all, thanks very much for all the info. You realize of course though, I hate you now. :p

Argh, StratCaster too now. Oy. Well I have an old Alesis QSR, a Roland XV-5080, a Korg Triton-Rack, and a Yamaha Motif-Rack. That bell synth you were asking about Gui in Tension, is a synth (called Midnight SRX) on the "SRX Complete Orchestra" expansion board for the Roland. I'm using the old Alesis and that Roland board almost exclusively at the moment.

But I'd never heard of Gigastudio, or Garritan, or anything else in that list... I don't know diddly about using DSP, I only have the Playstation verson of FF7, I don't know how to use SoundFonts (yet) or a SoundBlaster (since my main comp is an OS X Mac)... so I'm feeling quite inferior atm. <pouts>

I do know OS X's CoreAudio framework supports SoundFonts but I'd never looked into them before. I also just use standard boring ordinary 1/8-inch stereo cables for recording, would need a dedicated piece of recording hardware to use SPDIF without a Soundblaster card I think.

Hey StratCaster, where in Boston are you? I spent 5 years there for college (MIT), really miss the place, sigh... Too bad I can't just walk over to talk about this stuff with you anymore, hehe.

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#13 Post by StratCaster »

Hey Lithium, I use Mac OS X (and a PC for some stuff). You must at least have a G4 in order to use OS X, right? I love GPO, you should check it out http://www.garritan.com/ it plugs into Digital Performer (as well as others) seamlessly... And the price is unbeatable... only $249! Although it is a memory hog, although what softsynth isn't? I use my JV-1010 to get the basic sounds while writing, then switch over to GPO a few at a time.

I used to live near Cambridge... I grew up in Somerville, one town over from Boston. Now I live a few miles north, but I commute into the city... this DNC is killing me! Actually, its not as bad as people said...so far...
"The mighty warships of the Vl'Hurg Empire dived screaming upon the unknowing Earth, where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog." -Hitchhikers Guide

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#14 Post by LithiumMongoose »

Yeah, it's an 867 MHz G4 PowerMac desktop, I got it when I graduated almost exactly 3 years ago. Am planning to upgrade to a PowerBook so I'll finally have a portable for airplane flights and trips to LA to visit my best friend and so forth, but I'm staunchly waiting for them to upgrade the resolution on the 17" model to at least 1600x1024 (it's currently stuck at 1440x900 and won't change til the next major revision at the earliest).

Thanks for the link, I will look into it. Aye I know Somerville, never went there much though. My main haunts were Cambridge and the downtown area, for obvious reasons. :) I dunno, personally I'm enjoying the DNC (on CNN) a great deal. But then again I'm a liberal who hates Bush and really really likes Kerry (whereas I was so-so on Clinton and bleh on Gore).

I looked into the composition software options for OS X a while before I even got the G4, since I was one of those ppl who adopted it when 10.0.0 'public beta' came out. None of them really appealed to me, b/c they all seemed geared toward producing human-readable printable scores for real instruments and such. Don't remember if I looked at Digital Performer or not, only one I really remember atm is Sibelius. Any rate, my old program I'd been using since the dawn of time was called ConcertWare, it first existed back in the Mac Plus/SE days and was maintained for a while but ultimately stopped being updated and fizzled. Even so it ran fine on OS 9 years later, it just couldn't be used on X. But even that wasn't the perfect program for me, so, spurred on by the new OS crisis I decided to write my own. It's proudly named LlamaWare. Doesn't know how to export to midi, or deal with SoundFonts, yet, the midi importer isn't working entirely properly, Undo/Redo isn't implemented yet, and various other minor limitations, *but* at least I have the GUI design of my dreams, and it works quite well. It's just I so seldom run into other ppl using OS X, on here or otherwise. So if you have any interest in fooling around with LW I'd be happy to send you the app. :)

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#15 Post by StratCaster »

You wrote your own software sequencer? That's cool. If you want something done right, do-it-yourself....as the saying goes...

I have to say I'm very surprised you are not using Logic, DP or Pro Tools. I thought that's what all Mac-music-people used...I'm new to the Mac scene myself.
"The mighty warships of the Vl'Hurg Empire dived screaming upon the unknowing Earth, where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog." -Hitchhikers Guide

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