Audioverdrive: Exploring Bidirectional Communication between Music and gameplay

We describe a system for bidirectionally coupling the music and gameplay of digital games, so gameplay procedurally varies the music, and music procedurally varies the game. Our goal is to inject game music more closely into the core of gameplay, rather than having the music serve as an aesthetic layer on top; traditionally, music responds to game state, but not vice versa. Such a coupling has compositional and design implications: composing game music becomes a kind of composition of gameplay, and furthermore, game-design decisions feed back into the music-composition process. We discuss an arcadestyle 2d side-scrolling game, Audioverdrive, demonstrating this integrated music/game composition approach.