Working procedural music system in unreal Engine 5.7
Wow, it has been a long time since I first uploaded a simple drum machine MetaSound to this site. This design has come a long way since then and I am excited to share it with you.
In the last few months I have built a selection of instruments using modal, additive, and subtractive synthesis and learnt about several synth modals which have become staples of my designs (such as the Karplus-Strong model, there will be a post about that soon enough), created effects patches which now have permanent places in my tool kit for synthesising instruments, and built a simple game to test these all in action.
In this game you play as a small God on a desert island, when a castaway washes up on your shore you see the chance to grow in power. As more followers wash up your challenge is to farm them for faith whilst keeping them happy until you have successfully had them erect a grand temple in your honour. Depending on how moral your rule is and how powerful you remain the music will vary around you, becoming richer, sparser, faster, slower, more dissonant, more consonant, depending on your decisions.
All of this is managed by mapping data from gameplay to the music system, in line with what that data tells us about the narrative. For example: fewer faithful castaways means our god is not very powerful and the music will become tense as a result; and hungry citizens and a large number of buildings requiring human sacrifice suggest an immoral god, the music is more likely to be dissonant.
Between night and day, more subtle changes occur in the music, soe instruments become quieter while others remain at the same volume but are less likely to play, leading to stripped back melodies. In some cases the tone of instruments changes, with the banjo simulating a palm-mute at night time.
The full range of instruments you hear in this video are glockenspiel, tenor banjo, guitar, bell, 2 flutes, djembe, war drum, miscellaneous percussion. Keep an eye on this page if you would like to see breakdowns of how these are built.
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