The Automatic Violin
There are lot of musical games, apps, devices, and “interactive experiences” out there. Many of them are not great, and that tends to be for one of two reasons:
- They are simple to get into, but have very little expressiveness.
- They are very expressive, potentially, but there is no way for the layperson to interact with them right off the bat.
I usually think of this as the Musicbox/Violin problem.
When someone builds a Musicbox, you push a button or two or several, and something comes out. It might seems pretty, but there’s not a lot to achieve by investing more time with it. It makes a sound, a very specific one, from an input. Mastery and experimentation are off the table.
A Violin, however, is an expressive and rich experience. It serves equally well in a bluegrass band and a symphony orchestra. The world has not exhausted the possibilities for the violin, and it may never. But, when someone introduces a new instrument into the world, while they may have created the thing itself, they do not create the history, musicology, notation system, training academies, or cultural associations. Stringing cat gut over a wood box does not create a violin concerto, the performer who plays it, the venue in which it is played, or the audience who appreciates and weighs the performance against a long line of other performances. All you have instead is a screechy contraption.
Cadence, a demo game whose full development is up on Kickstarter, begins to crack the problem. The first levels are very Musicbox — connect one node to the next, complete the puzzle, a motif or chord starts playing, move on. You would probably not think much about the music at all, aside from hearing a few charming sound effects. But, in building up the tools at your disposal and layering on the complexity, I did something that I never do in other games: I stopped trying to win.
If you are like me, a musical novice, and you have ever sat yourself in front of a modern sequencer, I am sure you have had the same sequence of feelings:
- “This is great!”
- “So powerful! So… many options.”
- “Huh. Ok, that sounds good. I guess.”
- “I am getting nowhere.”
Staring down that piano roll is as intimidating as the blank page is for a writer. Fortunately, Cadence limits your options just enough to get you started. You get a handful of notes and drum hits, some directed nodes that keep the progression on track, some chord-making nodes, some chord-ending node, switches and a few other bits and pieces. The “winning” song is always lovely, but, in the confines of what you have, you get to knock around even a simple level for a while.
As the game progresses, the composition possibilities really open up. The last couple of demo levels tease at the beautiful possibilities. The level shown below is a Musicbox, at first, since you hardly need to do anything to get the win state to happen. But the game pieces are open enough that composing new music (albeit weirder and more chaotic) is easy and fun. And, as a terrific bonus, you can choose any number of sound-sample sets per level to make the songs you own. It is truly a playable sequencer.
The game itself is a worthy peer of other casual puzzlers out right now, including my current favorite, HOOK. And the play gives you multiple avenues into understanding how to compose. You can think of the nodes as electronic components (diodes, transistors) or traffic (one-way streets, stop signs) or even as PureData or Max/MSP elements, toward which this game makes a generous nod. However you want to get into the puzzle, the game leads you with these affordances into making music.
As I write this, the time is running out on Cadence’s Kickstarter campaign. I hope it makes it. Even if it does not, it has already been voted into Steam Greenlight and garnered very positive critical attention. If Kickstarter fails to deliver, I really think a publisher will pick this one up. In the meantime, try the demo, support the campaign, spread the word and make a little music of your own.
