At this year's Olymptronica fair, Hans HiScore premiered a new idea: Creating the music for a video game WHILE the player is playing it!

Apart from being a great show at game events and a lot of fun for the players as well as the audience, there is another reason behind this idea: We think that soundtracks should be as interactive as possible and adapt to the way players play the game. State of the art sound engines do a great job in allowing interactive soundtracks already. But creating the music while the game is played, is a whole new level of interactive experience.

Entertainment media went a long way starting with silent movies more than 100 years ago. Back then, the medium (film) was linear, but a piano player created a live soundtrack for it. Later, music was added to the movies and so the film as well as the soundtrack became linear. With the arrival of video games, the medium finally became interactive, but the music remained static and didn't adapt to the interactivity of the medium. Today is the time we have the technology to create interactive music for this interacive medium of video games. However, a great hammer doesn't make you a master builder - it still needs the creative minds to conceptualize real interactive music. This is where we at Hans HiScore want to continually challenge ourselves, to create truly interactive audio. The live scoring of a video game (it was Nintendo's Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii at the Olymptronica 2009) is a great challenge to find even more creative ways of producing such interactive and immersive music.

We will soon upload a video of the gaming/concert session we did at Olymptronica.