I’m a Music and Audio Technology student currently in my final year of study at Bournemouth University. For my final year project I have decided to create a generative music engine that will respond to stimulus from a game level in order to synthesize and generate music in real time using Supercollider.
I was wondering if anyone could help me out in creating a game level in order to do this. I am starting to grasp the basics of Unity but I have far more experience as an audio programmer rather than a level designer/ games programmer and my project is more to do with audio than game development.
I am looking for a horror game level similar to Slender where the character is constantly pursued by a single enemy with an overall objective to collect a number of objects to forward to story. I’m looking for the play time to be between 15-20 minutes. The scientific analysis part of my project will be to look at the emotional impact of the playing experience of the player using galvanic skin response, and testing three different kinds of audio engine to see whether their is any difference in the response.
In terms of development time scale it would be nice to have a working build of the level by the end of the year, but any sooner would be great. Scientific testing will take place at the start of March so any final tweaks to the level would have to be finished by then.
Please let me know if anyone is interested in helping with such a project. I’m afraid their is no financial incentive as I am a poor student, but this could be a good project for peoples portfolios, and it’s alway exciting to work with new people.
It’s very interesting, i’m not an expert of programming or modelling, but if you need little things like simple scripts maybe i can help you (if i have free time).
I have experience in this, however can not help you by programming due to having very limited time. I can give you advice.
The first thing you want to do is setup a script/directive of how this engine should behave. In this script you define what “actors” or “triggers” there are to influence your music. Examples are area’s, triggered events like picking up a book, the slender is near, number of input actions of the user, etc. From there you can define what influence these should have on your music and if this should be handled by Unity, Supercollider or a combination. From there the programming can start.
Regarding Suppercollider, you must have a plugin for Unity or find someone that can link the main .dll of Supercollider to Unity.
I am doing research now (for my study) on measurable emotional responses and I can tell you that galvanic skin response alone probably isn’t going to give you any result at all. These already vary from person to person, age, temperature, excitement, etc. It will most likely vary so little you will not be able to draw conclusions for that. Even if you add in skin temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate and others, you still have hardy any distinguishable result. Extremely well calibrated measuring devices have been made for measuring emotion on several parameters, but these are still not confirmed to be conclusive. Rather you could go for standardized emotional surveys that are available in the hundreds. These can either be discrete or by VAS. This or you could let players play your game in an MRI to determine BOLD response in certain area’s of the brain using fMRI.