soundcraft

SoundCraft is a framework that enables real-time data gathering from a StarCraft 2 game to external software applications, allowing for musical interpretation of the game’s internal structure and strategies in novel ways. SoundCraft was created with the StarCraft 2 Map Editor, Ruby, and the ChucK audio programming language. The paper detailing the technical and aesthetic development of SoundCraft was published in the Proceedings of the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) Conference 2013.

GG Music examines the possibilities of using StarCraft 2 as the interface to a rich musical environment. In GG Music, two players go head-to-head in a competitive match of StarCraft 2, observed by a third performer. As they develop economies and wage battles against each other, SoundCraft collects gameplay data, which is extensively sonified in real-time. The sonification rises and falls with the development of the ongoing match, exploring the relationship between StarCraft’s gameplay mechanics and musical performance.

GG Music was performed at the Music and Gaming Concert, Stanford, CA, April 2013 and at the 2013 Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression in Daejeon, Korea (performance proposal).

Source code for SoundCraft and GG Music is available on GitHub.