So I have a problem: I haven’t a musical bone in my body. I don’t just mean I’m not musically trained (admittedly true), music theory was something I could never fundamentally grok. Being statistically below the standard deviation for tone detection and all that probably doesn’t help.

Anyhoo, I can’t grok music. So naturally, the music aspect of any kind of game jam is one I tend to ignore. But music is nice in a game, I do love me some game music. So what’s a programmer to do?

Well, the obvious solution is to use free sources for music. A game I made for university, Ghost Hunt, uses music from The Open Game Art Bundle for exactly this reason. Nice bundle, all the assets in it are under the CC-Zero licence. Definitely recommend checking it out.

But there is another solution: To procedurally generate music to use in the game. This isn’t as simple as grabbing (admittedly excellent) music from a bundle and dropping it into your game, but it does give you more control. Now, that control for someone without an understanding of music theory is largely limited to the vaguest of settings tweaking, but the results can still be fairly cool.

Here’s an example of procedurally generated music I managed to create with minimal effort: link.

This was generated using Abundant Music. It’s free, which is nice. There are other free websites for this kind of thing, Fake Music Generator is an example that will generate an entire album with names and cover art. But Abundant Music gives you more control over the generation process, allowing for you to tweak the music to match whatever theme/sound/feel you are going for. Fake Music Generator seems to generate a lot of piano pieces with some hour music thrown in every now and then.

I find all this extremely cool, and is extremely useful for things like Ludum Dare, or even just placeholder ‘programmer’ music to go alongside placeholder ‘programmer’ art. And it makes one wonder about the potential to build a game like Bit-Trip or Beat Hazard based around this kind of procedurally generated music.