AIA Racer Music Demo

Let me start off by saying, hello and thank you for visiting my blog. The Purpose of this post is to talk about a recent project I had to do for my Advanced Interactive Audio class; it involved creating music loops for a racing game. I created a total of 8 loops; 2 that alternate for lap 1, 2 that alternate for lap 2, 2 that alternate for lap 3, a boost loop, and a loop that is layered on top of the lap loops when your in first place. My musical intent was to make the laps seem like they were progressing in urgency by building up the instrumentation. I composed the loops in the key of E harmonic minor with an added A#, because to me it sounded dark and still had a sense of movement, and energy. For my first place loop I used a cymbal hit that retriggered itself every quarter note. Now it doesn’t sound like a cymbal because I side chained a kick drum (not heard in the mix) to a limiter on the cymbal’s insert path. My boost loop is just a bass line and drums, but the bass line changes notes more frequently then in any of the other loops giving a sense of speeding up. Then I processed the finished boost loop track with a flanger and some soft distortion.

I really didn’t do as much processing to the loops as I usually do, but I did do a few things. The same bass was used throughout all the loops but in the first loop I used a low pass filter and some eq’ed reverb to make the bass seem really big and full but not in your face big. During the last 2 laps and the boost I added some hard distortion to the bass and got rid of the filter and the reverb. For the most part the drums are dry with the exception of the handclaps, which I drenched in reverb. The lead synths all have reverb on them, and during lap 3 one of the synths has a modulated gate on it. As for the changes between the two alternating loops that play per lap, they only have slight differences in notation and drum patterns.

Now for everything to sound smooth and continuous all the loops had to be exactly 2 bars in length at 140 bpm with no delay or tail. These loops were then imported into the UDK content browser, and then saved. But to implement these loops in the game I had to create five SoundCues. The SoundCues for laps 1-3 all have 2 loops that alternate. In order for this to happen I placed a random node in the signal path between the sound node and speaker. The boost and first place loops were easier because no deviation or alternate version were necessary, so no random nodes were used in the SoundCues. The SoundCues were brought into the Kismet Window. Laps 1-3 Sound Cues were controlled by play sounds and used a trigger at the finish line to change between laps. The first place play sound is only switched on when the racer is in first place, and plays along with the laps loops. Now the boost play sound overrides all loops and is played once before the lap play sounds start up again. In hindsight I wish the first place play sound would play along with the boost instead of being bypassed.

I really enjoyed making the loops for the music racer demo, because it was the first time I’ve had to make music with non-linear fashion in mind. It was challenging at first but once I had the concept down it made sense to me. If I could add one thing, it would be transition loops when going from lap 1 to 2 and from lap 2 to 3 to smooth them out. The only way i could get them to sound smooth was by hitting a boost before crossing the line.

Here's a link to the gameplay for the music racer demo 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01q-EueRMik&feature=youtu.be