CrossSong Puzzle: Generating and Unscrambling Music Mashups with Real-time Interactivity

There is considerable interest in music-based games, as the popularity of Rock Band and others can attest, as well as puzzle games. However, these have rarely been combined. Most music-based games fall into the category of rhythm games, and in those games where music is incorporated into a puzzle-like challenge, music usually serves as either an accompaniment or reward. We set out to design a puzzle game where musical knowledge and analysis would be essential to making deductions and solving the puzzle. The result is the CrossSong Puzzle, a novel type of musicbased logic puzzle that truly integrates musical and logical reasoning. The game presents a player with a grid of tiles, each representing a mashup of measures from two different songs. The goal is to rearrange the tiles so that each row and column plays a continuous musical excerpt. Automatically identifying a set of song fragments to fill a grid such that each tile contains an acceptable mashup is our primary technical hurdle. We propose an algorithm that analyses a corpus of music, searches the space of possible fragments, and selects an arrangement that maximizes the “mashability” of the resulting grid. This algorithm and the interaction design of the system are the main contributions.