Small Little Red Cube
2022 - Interactive Media, Fixed Media
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Program Note: This piece was created as part of a greater capstone project I did during my time at the Pembroke Hill School in Kansas City, Missouri. In this project, I explored and compiled language about the interactive music found in video games and placed this music within the greater contexts of academic electronic music and the internet. To put the ideas I had written about into practice, I created an adaptive score for a brief demonstration of Unity 3D which was created by my friend and colleague, John Shorter. The piece is composed of several layers of fixed media ranging from granulated recordings of a Vintage Stock to square waves reminiscent of the Commodore 64 SID chip to instrumental samples that I felt evoked more modern interactive experiences like Minecraft and Portal 2, among others. These layers change in volume in relation to the user’s position within Shorter’s interactive environment, creating a unique musical experience which relies on my divestation of compositional agency to the user. As a separate exercise, I composed a ten minute long fixed media arrangement of the audio layers akin to a Video Game OST.
More Information: The interactive side of this work is facilitated by audio source components in Unity 3D (pictured on the right) . They have a great breadth of functionality, but I used them to map the player's distance from three particular areas of the virtual environment to three specific audio tracks which all begin to play at the same time. The image to the left shows the player object, the Red Cube, in relation to an audio source component, shown by the white speaker icon. As I created the audio tracks all together, I usually talk about them as stems, or parts, of the larger project.
Though the game format can be a widely accessible mode of distributing interactive work, this particular game was not quite in shape to distribute in guaranteed working order. As such I distributed the audio by itself in a sort of OST format. This fixed media recording can be heard on the provided SoundCloud link or on any convenient streaming service. To create this OST, I arranged the three main stems into a twelve minute piece which can be broken down into sections that primarily feature each stem. The final section plays all the stems at once, an experience which is impossible in the game. Ideally, the sections could be shuffled to produce a somewhat unique experience as opposed to one that is completely fixed. Practically, this effect tends to fall a bit short of the full fixed work in quality, but could present an interesting idea to explore in a piece by itself.
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