Music as Active Information Resource for Players in Video Games

In modern video games, music can come in different shapes: it can be developed on a very high compositional level, with sophisticated sound elements like in professional film music; it can be developed on a very coarse level, underlying special situations (like danger or attack); it can also be automatically generated by sound engines. However, in all these approaches, no active adaptation of musical elements to user activities can be found. Context dependent and adaptive music elements are no longer background or emotional support structures, but transform to information resources, which can be actively used by the user. Thus, they become a kind of human computer interface. In this paper, we focus on music as active information resource in video games and game-based learning systems. [For the full proceedings, see ED562093.]