When Your Musician is a Robot, Part 3 (Can musical assets be free in a Virtual World?)
By Rudy Helm, Audio and Quality Assurance Tech, Visual Purple, LLC.
Well, it’s been a while, so I thought that we should continue with the theme from my previous blog entry. There are many interesting and fun things to learn. You may recall that we were discussing the notion of your project’s background music (BGM) having the desirable attributes of being copyright free, royalty free, and an original composition at that! Those characteristics undoubtedly appeal to virtual-world developers, makers of cutscenes, trailers and Machinima projects. With the tutorials that we present here, there is no reason why even non-musicians can’t generate musically useful results (even for foreground musical elements, but that discussion is for a later time).
This exercise exhibits a variety of musical styles and embodies them into a single animation sequence. The exhibit portrays a conference room where the attendees are gathered to give their ‘boss man’ a report on the TV and film entertainment industry (actually it’s taken from the 2010 Golden Globes). Embedded in this viewable animation we’ll feature synthetic actors with synthetic speech (TTS voice-overs) as foreground elements (click here for a refresher on the technique). With this test-scene we utilize only 2 TTS male and 1 TTS female voice libraries to cover a cast of 11 adult attendees.
The animation sequence was borrowed from one of our past projects. It had been a full-motion video of a dramatized high-level meeting and for this exhibit it has been ‘cartoon-ized’ to mask logos, etc. The original human VO audio discussed issues about how to save the world, but here we have replaced them with a TTS script chattering about the entertainment world. So, obviously the script is intended to be nonsense; the focus of this little project being on ambient background music production, and less on the TTS actors (but don’t worry, we will have some more in-depth tutorials on TTS production in the near future!).
Now, please view and listen to the animation sequence. Imagine that at this meeting there might be a radio playing in the background for this scenario.
“- Link to”
YouTube Visual Purple When Your Musician is a Robot, Part 3 (Can musical assets be free in a Virtual World?)
The Conference Room exhibit –listen to the musical elements as they each segue. Note how well BGM serves the animation and VO.
In part 4 of this series I will discuss the usage of the music tool. Remember these numbers: 1-4-5? (if not, click here). Essentially, it’s all you need to know about music theory to engage in these tutorials.
[to be continued]
