Audio & Educational Technology

First, let me say that the music design behind Spore is as impressive as the game itself. For the sake of educational research for my class, I recorded the audio that played during each of the three processes.

Why not record video? Unfortunately, although Spore allows recorded video, it only does this at very specific stages of the game, such as ‘testing’ a creature once created, and screencapture software cannot sufficiently capture the video, since the video doesn’t play in a ‘window’ on the screen.

However, because I was able to use Cubase to record the audio, I was able to easily compare the audio on 3 different tracks–and in one instance I played a selection of audio from all 3 tracks simultaneously and was pleasantly surprised to hear overlapping harmony in all 3 tracks, even as the music played was subtly different.

A few broad points to start, based on my initial testing:

1. Spore plays ‘dynamic’ music at key points in the game that include: the main menu, creature selection from Sporepedia, creature editor, randomizing creatures, etc.

2. Spore appears to play the same music during: the animation sequences that open the cellular & creature stages, and as background loops during the cellular organism stage.

3. The experience of ‘dynamic music’ can be described in each stage in the following ways:

a. Each key stage (i.e. main menu, creature selector, etc.) tends to have a distinct musical ’style’.
b. If I use Cope’s definition of musical style as including:

“the identifiable characteristics of a composer’s music which are recognizably similar from one work to another. These include, but are not limited to, pitch and duration…timbre, dynamics and nuance. “

then I would characterize the styles represented in each key stage in Spore as having a distinct and recognizable: tempo, density (instrumentation), and a trend towards similar harmonies & rhythms (these can be congruent in successive plays, are sometimes transposed, and sometimes shift between instrumental parts–again, these seem to me to be ‘tendencies’, not hard/fast rules).

c.  Upon successive playing of the audio from each ’stage’, and as a result of the same menu choices & user interactions, it appears that “style” can be found in listening to the repetitive variations of musical ‘fragments’.  How these fragments are generated (e.g. single pitches, phrases, loops, etc.) are a mystery to me.

Well, I’ve spent the last week playing Spore repeatedly in an attempt to analyze the procedural music generated by Spore.  The game is organized according to several different stages–life as a cell, life as a creature, life in a tribe, etc.  You start the game as a cellular organism that has to eat to survive–or be eaten & perish.

Along the way, you get to ‘customize’ your organism, ‘mate’ with others from the same ’species’, and eventually ‘evolve’.  From a musical point of view, there are several key ‘hitpoints’ worth noting.  My analysis of Spore necessitated playing the game long enough to be able to restart a new creation at the ‘creature’ level, and figure out a sequence of duplicable steps to test the results of the audio as initiated by my choices in the menus.

Since there are an enormous amount of combinations of choices that one can make (especially at the creature stage), I decided to fix a single path of interactivity from the very first menu selection.  Here’s a summary of the overall process that I followed several times in succession:

1.  Choose an empty planet; select a new ‘creature’ stage to begin.

2.  Use the creature selector to choose a creature from Sporepedia (the online gallery).

3.  Select the ‘Krinkut Maxis’ creature because of its flexibility and attributes.

4.  Select the ‘easy’ difficulty setting.

5.  Choose the default planet name that appears (this is randomly generated by Spore).

6.  Spore now randomizes the creatures that I will encounter in the game.

7.  The game environment appears.  Follow the beginning ‘entry pop-up’s’ that appear.

8.  Feed the creature by letting it eat fruit from the closest tree.

9.  Head in a Northeasterly direction & interact with the first set of creatures encountered.

10.  “Sing” to the creatures to “Impress” them.  Earn DNA points to spend on enhancements.

11.  Head back to the “home nest” to mate.  This brings up the creature editor. (the idea is that you can ‘evolve’ if you have enough DNA points to spend on an enhancement.

12.  Don’t make any changes to the creature, and exit the creature editor.

13.  The creature will automatically get the ability to ‘charm’ at a higher level.  Practice this ability by following the prompt.

14.  Exit the game.