Procedurally Generated, Adaptive Music for Rapid Game Development

Audio design is an important aspect of game development which may be neglected in time-limited rapid prototyping game creation events. In such environments, members of small development teams often multitask or switch roles, but they may not possess the necessary time, resources or skills for original music compositions. In this paper, we present AUD.js, a system developed for procedural music generation for JavaScript-based web games. By taking input from game events, the system can create music corresponding to various Western perceptions of music mood. The system was trained with classic video game music. Game development students rated the mood of 80 pieces, after which the Markov Chains of those pieces were extracted and added into AUD.js. AUD.js can adapt its generated music to new sets of input parameters, thereby updating the perceived mood of the generated music at runtime. We conducted a user study during Global Game Jam 2014 at Cal Poly. We find that while the quality of the audio is lower than hand-picked or composed pieces of music, AUD.js is capable of being a useful and cost-saving tool for game developers working with constraints.