Where Does the Game End and the Instrument Begin?

[Music] everybody's surviving GDC so far that's about how I feel the the post party day talks are always the interesting talks first a couple of housekeeping reminders please remind attendees to fill out the session evaluation email that received from surveys IT and international comm after each session they attend also if we want to just just continue this afterwards there is a wrap-up room afterwards although this is I believe is the last audio session headlining and obviously turn your phones to vibrate it's always embarrassing when the audio person has their phone ring in talking about not so I'm very excited I was asked to moderate this panel set up by

some of the folks at Smule and we kind of we're trying to figure out what what they really made sense in terms of interactivity and the kinds of stuff that goes on and we ended up with this notion of where does the game end in the instrument begin right there's a whole lot of interesting things that you know device you know massive amounts of compute power you know from the historical standpoint right here can give you as well as the kind of cool things that are you know happen whether it's Morpheus or hololens or magic leap or Kinect or all of these sorts of other kinds of things or plastic guitars and so that really essentially is open up a whole big genre of categories of you don't even know what to call them you know mapping new applications or something like that cool ways to make music and have compute power really help you do it so I would like we have an incredible set of expertise on the panel in terms of this goes Matt Box John mold

alert Nick and David and I'd like you to go down and introduce yourselves and just stay a little bit out who you are and what what you've been working on yeah my name is Matt Bock I work at harmonica music systems I got my start working in rock band hardware designing drums and guitars and making sure that they worked and then worked on all the rock band pro stuff and then from there started prototyping for Dance Central worked on all three of the dense central games and most recently I created directed Fantasia music evolved a collaboration between Harmonix and Disney Interactive it's a reimagining of the classic 1940s film Fantasia I'm David young I'm its mule I am on our content team which is the team responsible for all of the music or really any other content that comes out and all of our different music apps I currently handle all of our pre production scheduling licensing which is a whole fun thing if you want to ask me

about and all of that for our music releases and before that I was a Content producer first mule for over a year and I did bunch of the musical arrangements that some of you may be a played in magic piano or singer guitar hello my name is Nicholas Bernardi the lead audio designer at hooba soft San Francisco and I am one of the unfortunate people that has one of these mics instead of that one yeah so I work at Ubisoft San Francisco it's uber soft San Francisco's a newer studio it's actually right down the street third and Brannan but we're mostly known for Rocksmith and as far as my involvement with Rocksmith I was working on it from the beginning before it actually even was at Ubisoft so I was one of the original people working on it designed a lot of the game along with Paul cross and now ego the producer on the project three of us kind of built up the studio from there amazing experience coming out with Rocksmith 1 and then

Rocksmith 2014 the most recent one and that's what I'm still currently doing Rocksmith is still alive and we're releasing DLC three to five songs every week hi John Oliver from Steel Senior Programmer over there and we're neighbors with this guy so we're in town and hello to you guys in the front on the left can feel free to come forward but let's see so I work on magic piano that's me only did a lot of that and sing karaoke and before that a bunch of game studios around the Bay Area I worked on DJ Hero for Activision for a bit and nowadays I'm working on music videos it's meal which is kind of cool and yeah it's good for now so how you know people have been working directly on technology that you know

sort of empowers people to learn music or make music in ways that we don't think you know normally music is you take piano lessons and you or you study the violin or you you know do marching band or whatever but it seems like devices and them some of the earliest mule and Curren mule projects are very you know let's make it easy for somebody to get up and sit on something cool so how what kind of you know thought or empowerment goes into making these kinds of things that's they they're cool instrument musically but at the same time not just something where it does so much of the work for you that you're really just kind of pressing a bunch of presets I think whatever whatever application you're using whatever your input divided devices whether you're just touching the iPad or whether you have a controller or an actual instrument or even just your voice whatever your input device is the point of it like you said is to get somebody participating with the music as quickly as possible at least coming from learning guitar this is like a classic

problem with guitar right you go out you buy a guitar for some reason you're inspired maybe you're in college or something and you bring it home and you have a really hard time making the chords and you don't know what you're doing then you go and look at tablature that doesn't really help you it's harder to read it and maybe you do know exactly what you're supposed to do with tablature and you you take the time to put into it but you're just you're really disconnected from the goal and the goal is just like I want to play along with a Bon Jovi song right now I don't want to wait months and months and months and sure enough you pour months and months and months into the guitar and she's still not really getting to what you want like as far as our goal I believe that this was the same for you guys it's about how what is the least amount of effort that I need to be instantly be able to play with the music and connect to the music is that's what I want to do and then once you get that you've actually inspired somebody you're motivating them and then you can take them to do whatever else you wanted I

agree mostly I think our battle is on that front end where you want it to make it super easy for somebody but and and you mentioned in your original question is do you make it to where do you where is the language it's so easy that you're like oh I'm just pressing buttons or I'm interfacing it exactly what it's telling me to interface and then at that point I'm just you know I have a set of commands and I have to follow them I'm thinking more about following the commands and I am actually expressing the idea of music and the expressivity which was his presentation yesterday kind of touched on a little bit which was cool and so yeah that's like but magic piano and John can talk more about that but it's like the you know as the little fireflies drop down they wait for the player and you know there's the ebb and flow of actually having some control over over tempo and yeah I think we

found like Nick said like getting there quickly is super critical for the majority of our users at least who are not like I want to learn guitar they're like you know mobile app users may be gamers music lovers it does not take very much for them to feel like get some ownership over it it really was enough for them just to be like oh I can change this like I have some amount of control yeah it's not intimidating at all right right I don't want to intimidate them for sure but it didn't it doesn't take a whole lot to give them that that feeling of course like exactly how you do that is actually you know a lot of work the presentation and like teaching people what seems like it should be super simple interface like tapping a glowing thing on the screen actually doesn't always elicit that from everyone that's that's probably the bigger challenge I think actually is how do you like

educate people like from nothing and as with this little friction as possible actually in Fantasia we're building a lot of sort of new gestural instruments I've kind of based on some vague concepts of things like chaos pads the like kind of looking at accessible tools that people already use for these types of purposes and one of the things that we found that really helps people understand that you know they've put in some arbitrary gestures that's super duper accessible there's moving their body but the thing that changes that from just being some arbitrary movement to making them feel like they have some authorship is really just sort of abusing repetition we will you know record the thing that you do and just keep playing it back to you and you know you hear something once or twice in a row you start to recognize what its melodic contours are and then you start to feel a bit of ownership of it and so we really used the sort of joy of repetition to give people a sense of ownership and authorship over the thing that they were doing and that's cool too I think like all of our applications are going to a point where you want to do

the thing where you're getting somebody participating right away right because you want them to connect with the music and have fun I'm especially important for Rocksmith because these are people who have probably given up guitar once before right that's a I mean a lot of our user base were people who had guitars in their closet they just couldn't connect to it before but after you get them actually playing and connecting and playing their favorite songs and relating to it somehow you want to go that other stuff you want to say you're not just repeating music that's coming at you you're feeling like the notes you're playing are your own you're feeling agency over what you're doing and you actually are putting in more you're starting to actually make your own stuff like a decision we made early on the the first Rocksmith is we don't like knock your we don't like lower your score or anything for playing more notes we just want you to play what's there you want to play stuff in between if you want to solo on top of stuff like absolutely go and like there's interesting things that I see these type of apps doing where they're giving you places to like to

start putting in more and start putting in more of you into it and in fact like the a lot of your apps where you're actually sharing things and sending them back and forth between friends it's implied right you're supposed to be doing that it's like I've sent this to you I didn't just like I didn't just like copy something I didn't copy someone else's homework and send it to you like I actually sang on this thing it's me it's my voice I put in my own little like kind of flurries into it now it's your turn to do something with it like that that stuff is implied and actually like makes the experience so much better well it also goes to the fact that music yes it can be a personal secluded thing if you want it to be but in the grand history of humanity and culture music is a very collective experience that you want to share and interact with people even across cultural and language boundaries and that's a big reason why we push that share stuff besides the

fact that you and it's totally an important thing to get to that point because I definitely remember when I when I started playing music I was not about playing with other people it wasn't out like hair in my face just like in in my in my bedroom lights off like like not playing in front of anybody like I definitely had like stage fright and didn't really want to communicate with anybody like branching through that as a musician is really really important because that's the point right yeah like you said yours if it is a social event you're supposed to be playing with people you think that's one of the reasons that some of the the social music games and thinking like like rock bands specifically there was a phenomenon where all of a sudden there were tongue you know lots of soccer mom rock band groups and I think back a little bit to you know watch Amadeus what did people do at parties they play piano and sing or play harpsichord in the same so do you think this you know talking about the sort of solo experience versus the the group experience that's something that's made much easier with the devices we have now

or is that is it almost sort of in the way Facebook is sort of isolating at week the other way on that a little bit right as being social making music doing something on your own sharing it or is it more of a collaborative thing in art is that do you see that being reflected in products or the way they might maybe things would go do in the future in terms of digital music making digital personal music magic making right out the gate I guess I'll say that our mission statement is connecting people through music so we are completely on so yes yes yes absolutely I think in in general there's something that has kind of like a little bit happened with our society where we have we don't connect with music as well as we maybe used to like you said like oh people used to have fancy parties where they got around

and played piano and everyone's saying right whereas like nowadays especially at least especially when I was growing up like I was really insecure about singing and didn't like openly do it and like there wasn't there wasn't like a lot of musically coming together and things besides like the required like singing classes in like elementary school or something like that I think in general like for some reason we've kind of like branched away from that not necessarily with just singing or playing instruments but even like connecting over music in general like like America used to be the central location for swing dancing you know like that's that's a way of connecting with music like literally you're you're dancing on the beat right we used to be the hub for that now we're not sweden is like other all the other countries across the world have been like swing dancing so great you guys came up with this it's like yes I we don't do it anymore I mean we do it like which is in an in like a very very niche group of what it used to be so I I

really like seeing types of mediums and types of applications that actually connect people back together back together musically like this okay I think rock band is certainly a communal experience I think to a degree that the fear of singing in front of people is part of the reason why a rock band is a great product and a great experience right you get one person doing karaoke and three other people also get to participate in what rock band is without having to take the risk of singing I think that's certainly a big part of it as we've you know continued to build all of our games multiplayer is a thing that we insist on having and we want to create shared musical experiences in your living room and you know people do a lot of kind of sharing of those they're sort of skilled performances in rock band or the like on YouTube I tend not to think about that necessarily as musical sharing so much as proficiency sharing right kind of bragging to a degree but with Fantasia because every single performance that

you're doing is generative in some way we have you know opened up YouTube sharing for that and you do hear very very different interpretations of all these different songs people feel a bit of ownership over them kind of looking at the YouTube comments when responding to each one and you know I think they're they're connecting with people through the kind of unique spin that they've taken on a given song and you know spreading that out across the internet but it's possible for them to do that in their own living room with their own friend as well and all of the sort of different compositional elements in Fantasia we've also built for multi players you can do it for a trading forest kind of way or you're creating half the phrase or the person creates the other half of the phrase and those moments we always see people look together smile after they've done that and then go back to playing the song because they've built something together and you know the best feeling I think like of ever being in a band it's just drummer starts bass player comes in guitar player goes in and someone starts singing and when you're part of that it just feels amazing even if your bed is

absolutely terrible even the drummer's not playing in time at all that that sort of feeling of all coming together towards the same ends it's just ineffable it's amazing I was about to say that's exactly like we you know all of us up here are musically inclined so we've all we're everyone in the band looks at each other it's like that moment that just happened and is happening right now that like we all just clicked there was the most awesome music thing that we all just innately did together and was this crazy connective thing good luck recording them yeah I sort of think of the those bursts of SoundCloud comments as as the Internet doing this right like the producer is and has everyone kind of looking at them at this moment because you know they've picked out some particular part of the song that they like and you see a million comments pop up at the same time you know if the dubstep song has definitively where the drop is but in other types of music it tends to be where interesting quality changes have

happened I think you get that almost same feeling of eye contact of validation and you kind of are getting to do it in a larger and larger group which is kind of amazing and that's a funny thing I haven't thought about looking at dubstep songs on soundcloud and being like there's just one location where all of the comments are going to be for sure oh the beat dropped here back to Brian's original point I wanted to say in some you like the magic piano app I think is a more solitary experience but I don't think it's like further I don't know isolating people I think that there's those people that want to play in their bedroom and they just want to get into a song and then do it in a you know personal way and just get something out but yeah I think that the phone app technology can indeed be like putting people in their own virtual world and taking them away from the moment we've all experienced that there's probably some of you out there checking your Facebook right now and that's cool I was doing that during the talks earlier and

that's cool you could you could levy that criticism on on our apps but um I thought the interesting thing about seeing actually and and like these guys were saying like the coolest Musical social experience I think is being with people in the same space that shared moment is the magical mists of it so what can you do with mobile what can you do with in half well there's some other spaces you can still be social with in a different way and and I think with the sing karaoke we get people to sing who like maybe aren't quite outgoing enough to actually go to a karaoke bar or they don't have time to they don't want to get in front of a room with other people strangers they don't know but it really likes singing those songs and they'll sing them when they're comfortable in their own room and then they'll share that recording and so they sound good yeah yeah you got to get the you know kind of a diet reflections of the bathroom that so that's ideal yeah but um but they'll share it and and you

know I I listen to these people singing the songs a lot and they're terrible sometimes through average because that's what people are but they really just enjoy the music and they it is a genuine genuine social connection when they'll share them and they're their girlfriend or whatever will sing the duet part and it's it's pretty cool it's really it's exciting to me to see just ordinary people like making music doing their own thing not worrying about like am i as good as like my favorite you know musician like no it's not about that we're just you know making music so before Brian hits his up on another question and departs us for this you said something about recording which was really interesting or you're talking about that moment when you're all playing together and you look and you're like yeah this is the moment and then then I said something actually about recording like if you try to record that moment it's gone this is like if you guys are musicians and you've ever jammed with people you'll know this thing where you like try to record your jams cuz you're like they're so brilliant we come up with the coolest stuff when you put down a tape recorder or anything it's you've got no ideas

it's only garbage and you will never capture that moment and I think it's it's really interesting we had this same kind of thing with what's just kind of capturing these moments in general and like it's when you are impromptu just doing something with someone else and you don't have a lot of expectation you don't think about it that much those are when those moments happen it's almost like they happen outside of the recording and has nothing to do with it's a fact that it is just like a spontaneously kind of combine thing that that makes those magic moments actually come to the front and makes you actually experience them yeah recording and recording in general is just more of like a solitary experience like to a degree I mean okay so I've been playing guitar for like 17 years 18 years at this point but I also took a long detour into electronic music and that is solitary recording experience that is like I am up all night because I have like a triple shot latte and it's 4:00

in the morning and I'm tweaking knobs on this synth for way too long like I really like the idea of of this doing it on the fly of like just like even the stuff that happened with the later games where you could just drop in in the middle of playing you know are like oh I want to play with my friend just add them now it's like that really informal 'no smo meant sky to happen instead of like pushing it to a more structured experience like recording would be it is nicely that that recording does enable folks who might have a lot of performance anxiety to be able to do their performance on their own terms in their own time and then share that with the rest of the world and i think that's a really nice aspect of app based karaoke right there's so much about the karaoke experience that is just in being you being the person singing that song but you know if you are paralyzed with fear at the point in time which i just sing in front of other people it's not really a thing you can do anymore certainly i think there's plenty of singers out there who kick everyone else

out of a studio and it's time to do their vocal takes like it's a thing where you want to be alone with yourself but it's nice that those alone moments can be shared and that you know you don't have to have a microphone setup and preamps and whatever else you're giving people that and it's it's a it's a thing that i'm sure we've all done recorded and shared music but enabling other people do that's amazing we saw a really interesting I guess representation of this when our so we have a sing sing as our karaoke app and karaoke can kind of be a bad word and a divisive word and so you know we're trying to do everything we can the app to make it not the the site of karaoke that people hate which is the drunk person in a bar slaughtering a song and everyone like wincing and listening to it there's at times I like Carrie it has it has its moments but I don't know if I'd need to sit down and hear that as a musician but we didn't have video up

until October and once the video switch happened you don't have to do perform on video but the entire element of well at least I can still hide behind my you know my profile image and just record this now it's like oh now you're gonna see me in my bedroom like performing and it's messy and I a lot of people like do their makeup and do their hair and get everything ready and just the the interesting seeing the ways that people got more engaged because they're on video and then the other people that I got less engaged in just stucked is still doing audio only because they were intimidated by it's different personality types some people like to perform more and like that aspect and our artists in that room and will put a lot more energy in there whereas other people are just more of that don't like performing but still like music so you get the ax like you know in the closet recording musicians like like myself you

know the people who say like okay the rest of the band I'm kicking you out of the studio or I'm recording my vocal tracks at home you get this done yeah different different personality types interfacing with music in different ways and the cool thing that that I see in in our apps is that and we have inroads for all of those different types so there is like an inroad for the person who wants to record by themselves well there is also a way for everyone to just play together and not worry about recording and stuff like that more roads there's a way in which just proposing that this thing is a game takes the stakes down right like if you're telling someone okay you need to perform a musical phrase write some music verses hey just like we're playing this game it's all cool don't worry about it there's a way in which it just it gives you an excuse to be expressive and that kind of framing of that musical experience I think just makes the whole thing less intimidating simply by framing it in a different way for the player also to when you say it's a game people don't be

Mont and don't mind being told what to do it first you know whereas if you're if you're doing an artistic endeavor of whatever sort like I don't know how many of you like took a lot of like art and high school but like it's it seems like even the people in high school like oh you should be drawing this this is our project I'm gonna want to draw that I want to draw this you know it's like it's like suddenly you're oh this is like who I'm supposed to be so I'm gonna do whatever I want whereas in a video game gamers are very used to saying hold X to run okay thanks for telling you that I'll hold X to run this doesn't have anything to do about me being artistic I just need to know the tools which is ironically what they were trying to teach you in our class in the first place but you mentioned making it was an artistic expression is that the ultimate goal of your products is is there a continuum between artistic expression and have a really good time or is that just just play around different personalities different goals or is this something you it's one of the challenges

sort of trying to more people somewhere along that continuum and have them start as fun and before they know it they're doing something kind of artistic so something that we definitely did with the with Rocksmith 2014 with the second Rocksmith is that we didn't try to assume where people wanted to go or what they wanted to do or how they wanted to learn or what they should be or anything we opened it up so that when we made the the UI like very much kind of follow this flow where if you just want to learn a song let's say your guitar or you want to learn how to play guitar you just want to learn a song great let's say you want to go do lessons first you can do that first let's say you don't even care about any of that you just want to play mini games like we let you go wherever and then the system adapted around that to say like okay they kind of bichos this song they're doing this they're doing this this means that they kind of want these things they kind of want to go this direction let me start teaching them this way let me start suggesting things to them this way and tell them about other places and then the game that they can go to answer your question it's like different personality types are after different things right there and it's like there's I guess the

person who would just want to get every note correct and play it with exactly the right tone in exactly the right way and like reproduce this thing as accurately as possible would be in in our terms somewhere along the lines of like the completest right we're in a normal game they would be the person who's I'd beat every mission I beat every side mission everything is perfect I've done everything I possibly can where's there are other people who will play a song maybe not learn all of it like maybe kind of improvise or screw around on top of it maybe afterwards turn off the game and like take that little bit and turn it to a song of their own different goals for different people and we didn't really with Rocksmith 2014 we left it open so we didn't make any assumptions about who you were and what you wanted to do we let you kind of go with it and guided you along the way to your goals I mean the mission statement of Harmonix is to you know offer non-musicians the experience of making music I think over the continue of the various harmonics products we sort of started with a

joystick based jazz freestyle a product called the axe it's like really really early on Harmonix days and then from there we kind of we really focused on I think performance simulation and I think Fantasia was the moment when we got back to the aspect of of sharing the process of making music with a broad population that certainly has been I think an overarching goal and overarching agenda for the entirety of the company we think we were hugely successful with things like rock band of sharing the feeling of performing music but it's a quite different thing to share the feeling of ownership and pride that you might get when you have done a particular unique thing that only you could have done and so certainly as we're going through the process of building Fantasia we're trying to figure out what types of interactions would net sufficient complexity such that the outcomes would be unique every single time there were millions upon millions of outcomes but that it was really hard to paint outside of the lines right to enter to take essentially what we did it take a lot of you know what we understand the rules

that bow find western music make the system know those rules and not ever let people do things that are outside of those rules so we do allow people to make the sort of artistic expression it's certainly a thing that we think is you know core to that game court of the promise of that game but we lower the stakes by making it very difficult not impossible to make what sounds like a mistake what is sort of traditionally a mistake it hard for them to sound bad put any of yourself into this and we're going to make it sound good to some degree that is like something that I feel like music games are going in the direction of and can do more and more and more of because right now you see there's a lot like especially on your phone if you download a lot of like music making apps for the there's very few of them that are actually geared towards like game and make music and have fun there are a couple don't let me say that there's not but you'll very quickly run into the area where you're like whoa I downloaded a da W a digital audio

workstation like Pro Tools or logic basically is on my phone all the buttons are super small okay I've gone over the deep end that's why I like stuff I was I was talking to David before this about smeels rap app where you just record your voice saying anything and then it takes a little bit processing time and then turns it into a rap and they have the video online where I don't know the guys name but he was doing a beavis and butthead cornholio and just like reporter is just reciting cornholio almost like Shakespearean you know and then it just turned it into a rap and I'm like well that's great it's doing a lot of stuff you put in whatever input whatever piece of yourself right that you want to put in doesn't have to be beavis and butt-head can be whatever and then it takes that and actually turns it into a song afterwards and you can see all of though you can start to hear all of the intelligent like oh and we're grabbing this that's clearly the same as that we're gonna make a phrase out of this or to make a phrase out of this they don't know what we did but we made a song out of it you know like that that type of um you can't screw this up ways of making music is great because I

feel like there's a lot of in general I mean that we've faced a lot of this with Rocksmith but there's a lot of intimidation to playing an instrument or making a song if you just put a guitar in somebody's hands they play your own song immediately and they've never played before like that's it they're never gonna play guitar again and you have to approach it very carefully I think there are lessons that are coming from from not only from games but also from for da W and hardware manufacturers and the like look at things like Ableton push or the most recent set of like complete keyboards a lot of these features are just to get rid of any of those exact same types of mistakes you sort of like set your push grid to exactly the scale that you want now you're dealing with you know what kind of was a piano but now is a subset of the keys that you would want to play and I think it's it's a thing that's useful for people that are musicians and could ignore those notes but you know they aren't going to need them because their song is in one key it's hanging out there I think those types of accessible

interfaces are happening both on the music instrument manufacturing side and from the game side there's interesting places where they meet in the middle I think we've seen a lot of cool products things like cosmic deejays that game early love it's a game where you sequence little things nail it build a song for you a track has these similar types of creative elements and I think I think seeing music technology move in that direction as music games move in that direction it seems like there's an there's a really generative and interesting space forming in between those two things it's not something I that we have anything that solves in any way but I worry a little bit that going too far in this direction eliminates the possibility for a casual music person that's using any one of our products to experience music either for the first time or on the side and that's not their main thing that the happy accidents that happen yeah when you don't have those restrictions and sitting down at a piano and accidentally plunking that wrong note but then being like wow hold on

that was actually really cool if I just like change this thing and all of a sudden you're in this totally new area and it was all because of a happy accident I think a lot of great moments in music happen out of happy accidents there's - we've we've - back to your an initial question like that continuum we're on the continuum we start at having a good time we need to make sure everyone's there and that seems to be kind of like the bottom line literally the bottom line and then where does it get to artistic expression well we've kind of capped it by making sure everything sounds good and this happy accidents don't happen so we've like limited that universe of what you can do artistics a pretty strong word I don't think we ever used that right that's kind of scary and I regret it saying that when I said it no it's good though I appreciate it but yeah it is I think you're absolutely right and that's that's that's a problem are there people were like losing who were like yeah I can take negative feedback I don't need my stuff to always sound good you know I

can I can deal like are we just losing all those people some people can take negative feedback some people can't take negative feedback very well there's kind of two philosophies on this and it's just isn't just in music and I'm so glad I have a segue to talk about this but like there's a lot of suggestive media out there now right or sick suggesting media like Netflix like your Facebook Timeline alike Hulu you know there's plenty of other things that suggest to you what you want right and the more and more stuff you go in that direction and the more and more stuff you buy or the more and more radicalized you end up getting right and it really kind of narrows your focus on the world so this is this is kind of like becomes a problem because like I think a general philosophy is you want to be a well-rounded person the more ways you have to enjoy life the more of a well-rounded person you are the more chances are that you're going to enjoy life or enjoy the thing that you're doing destiny just gave a talk where they were talking about this at

and obsessed with the game sorry but they were talking about this and they they talked about their goal if they were doing all of this data mining on their users and their goal was to make people well-rounded players because then if one of their venues kind of dropped off if it's like oh my friends stop playing now they don't stop playing to have so many other ways of doing this right and it's kind of like the same thing with music in this are you're in this talk of like where do you let the happy accident happen and where do you guide the person to the happy accident right I think in general music has been like music and music games have been a little bit behind the curve of getting there I think like I don't know I think we have a little bit more of a way to go until we get to the Facebook newsfeed point where it's like wow we have radicalized people to an insane degree they don't know what notes sound like out of the major scale we need to just throw in some blow Korea and we need to just shake them up you know I I don't think we're there yet although I am I'm totally behind what you're saying and why do we need to do that why do we need

to shake them up why do we what if they're happy just listening to a major quarter no no and most people most people will be in that's and that's that's totally fine but in general like and you know that was a complaint people had with destiny oh no water players a target number warlord like why did you give me a Titan helmet damn it but in general like I have a philosophy that it's a goal to be a more well-rounded person just in general it will give you more of a way to enjoy life enjoy music right like something that I did when I was a music school is if I found a genre of music I didn't like I'm like okay I just put it on and listen to him I try to figure it out like I I really wasn't into reggae like when I was in high school it's really not it took me a long time to figure out how to get into reggae and would say it's my favorite thing but the thing is I understand now and I feel like especially with music in general like it's so polarizing you know like metal fans or metal fans like blues fans are blues fans like there's things to enjoy

on both sides and the merging of that only makes your users more robust to the stuff you have to offer them in the first place what is better in in in us projecting musical experiences and giving people interfaces is ignorant is bliss and I don't like I can't do that wrong I don't even know that wrong that exists because I don't know that that's a scale versus people who I want to know all of the dark secrets of music and like I want all 12 no no I won Lego you know there's the there's the like your centers there's different kinds of people but you can have these three notes right now later on we'll give you some more notes well you can pay for those extra notes in the piano the piano as an instrument has internalized just as much of western music logic as anything else right like like we're so we're single here's all this open possibility right but there's plenty of frequencies that exist in between the notes in the piano a piano dictates to

you what kind of bees you're gonna make like any sort of a burning thirst thing we're designing and I think far be it for me personally to be able to say what the bounds of artistic expression are and and to suggest that some particular type of musical complexity makes for more valid or more well-rounded work from my perspective like I love a lot of sort of weird and strange novel genres of music that exists single gamelan but like you know there's contemporary music like say jersey club or music for 12 minutes and you're like 15.4 54 there yeah there was a performance space down here a while ago that was so awesome so awesome but it was the most niche thing ever I forget I think it was I forget the name of the studio but it was a performance space for really really specific artists and it was this room about this size and there were projectors all along the side so it was like a full 360 view and it was yeah

15.8 surround sound like like ena in a in a circle not just around you and they played the loudest craziest shows there and it was totally awesome in this incredibly niche thing yeah but they played like crazy out electronic like noise core there was one guy saw perform with only radios turned up and he was just mixing five different radios so I only get a brief anecdote John Stuart Mill's the founder of utilitarianism was really interesting thinker and at some point in time in his life he decided he was going to commit suicide and the reason he wanted to commit suicide was because he'd done some math he looked at the notes that existed that we could hear and you know the bounds that he thought music had you know the types of instruments that could be played etcetera etcetera and he realized that there was a mathematical formula he could build that would create all the music that ever exists he was like it's not worth it and we're getting out of here and I think what he misses is that music is bigger than that right we certainly have the option to have all

sorts of Tambor we have vocal performances we have a lot of opportunities for specific or it's for specificity that exists outside of musical complexity and I think when you know you read a lot of things of like Oh music is narrowing and all music sounds the same now and we can see New York Times articles about this like maybe once a year I think we don't give enough attention to what Tambor means and what sampling means and what calling back to previous types of music means I think there's no way we can ever run out of musical possibility and I think that that the same notion that underpins via the idea that we could run out of musical possibility is the same kind of strange notion of saying oh we need to get people this much space to express themselves one cannot run out of musical possibility within their lifetime so what I want quick thing on that is that alright let's look at where music is heading in that that's a loaded topic absolutely but it Tambor is a huge huge

part of that to the point that we've talked a lot so far as panel about just pitch but if we're talking about guiding users and allowing for I think tambour and especially in like the upping of the limit of people's you know the general public's acceptance of like harsh sounds that what we could and then you get been you're getting the whole semantics of what do you describe Tambor as and that all that stuff but how do we incorporate the idea of musical expression through Tambor more than just simplistic pitch and rhythmic constructs we got does everybody know what Tambor is yes this seems like it's a it seems a small audience who really knows what they're talking about as far as music goes so we're not gonna explain Tambor but ya know it's it's the difference between it's the difference between one style of music and another like all of the different chambers of instruments like a lot of the times the notes are

the same the rhythms are the same the content to say me you can even have the production be the same but the overall sounds of what the instruments are making connected people in different ways to an incredibly polarizing point which is silly because it's a harmonic spectrum that you're not even identifying notes in obtaining back to the original Smee laugh the the ocarina it's like that was something where there was this visceral connection between a human gesture and the timbre that comes out of that each that through so in in a sense of it seemed like you have the ability sitting here in your chairs at work to sort of have influence on these things is that something you directly think about or are you more heavily pitch focused and you know figuring out how to make happy mistakes because most musical mistakes are very unhappy mistakes I'll say we've been very much pitch centric with all our recent stuff and really talk to the future of stuff but I

don't know John yeah yeah it's interesting to put in those terms but we are very pitch centric I mean we I've been pushing for the drums app for a while man I want I want the deejay drums producer app but it's not coming this year but yes I think Timbers is uh is not quite I don't know it's not in the consciousness yet in that way you know for better or for worse it is to the degree of like that I mean the instrument that you're choosing to a degree like if you haven't had for example like like in session mode and Rocksmith you you get to choose between the different guitars and some of them actually share riffs some of them are literally playing the same thing so the difference between not all them we have a ton of riffs but the difference between one instrument and another instrument could just literally be the tone that we put on the chain basically the amp that they're going through but that's enough to make you go yeah that's my metal guitar that's the one I'm playing with that's what I relate to I

just want to say I absolutely loved the ocarina I remember like the first iPhone that I got I don't know if it was the if it came out on the original or how how early it came out I don't exactly remember but I was playing with it for so long and then like four hours and I flipped over to the other view and realized that there was the world and I could listen to other people and immediately got freaked out that that someone could have been listening to my horrible horrible happy accidents but it was also another moment of being really like that was when I saw like oh man this is such a cool thing I'm actually like connected to all these other people I can listen to this random girl in Japan play the Zelda theme perfectly drove me crazy because I couldn't do it but I just that was like a moment of seeing like wow this is where this is where music is going like actually being able to connect with people again in this way yeah the ocarina by the way it's like a flute basically it is that fluid in the Legend of Zelda

I can't reproduce the sound I'm not gonna try so like with autorap and with say like effects loadouts that you're doing in Rocksmith i think there's an aspect that you are at which you're taking genre conventions and kind of formalizing them and then letting people to reflect those back at them how much do you like put into trying to understand the kinds of guitar sounds that you want to have and how those this were related to genre and how much does sort of genre convention impact the kind of stuff that Shmuel making so at least of Rocksmith we have a leader guy Brandon West who is like the gear he's got he's got any band that you bring up with him he knows what piece of gear they used how they used it how they wired it together and that's super important for Rocksmith because we have all the individual pieces of it right and we call them authentic tones we call them authentic cones because we do an incredible amount of research to make sure that what you're putting in there whether it's licensed gear or something that you know it represents gear that

they used is as accurate as possible so we know like oh this distortion pedal literally did come before that wall I literally did do this and like we actually look at video evidence and stuff so it's very important we don't really make any assumptions like metal guitarists use this or you know these type of classic rock guitarists use these we go to the source and say this is this is how it was this day they were using this this amp and like for the license to gear that we do have in game we hooked them up with those you know it's thing they were using that 1969 Marshall with the with a slanted cab in this configuration with the microphone position like that it's that is a great question because in Auto rap we had something where the app was very like the project managers were very protective and like no it's only gonna be hip-hop and like are and being content and stuff that is very you can quantize rap to really easily and then there's a hook that you that Auto Tunes

to and the chorus is and then just recently we started flipping it we put all about that bass on all in Auto rap you know we have country tunes in our and taking stuff that never had rapping associated with it in any way and allowing the algorithm that's exactly the same to chop up someone's vocals ad and now that that florida georgia line song is totally a rap and we didn't change anything to the structure the song except for adding the the vocal element and it was super cool to see that and they've actually been super popular though it's impossible to gauge really is that just because all about that bass was the number one song right general music allows you a lot of awesome oh my god WTF moments right like one of my favorite bands a couple of couple years ago Sunday and it's a guy a girl talk and he just he went and using Ableton Ableton Live the empowering a generation to make a style of music that

would have never existed otherwise hacked up all of these songs and just put them together and blend it all between them and made incredibly intelligent like quick blends between stuff and if you ever listen to it it's like an album like it's like an hour and a half of just straight nothing but constant like only the hits dance music that he's just blending to its mash up stuff but like a much yeah yeah well I mean it's now and a half and then you're like done but but having those being able to combine things in in hilarious or like ways that you wouldn't have expected is like a huge part about music like that's why in in with Rocksmith accession mode it's it's a mode where you get to play with an AI band you can hook it up however you want to play with it and they actually listen and adapt to you this is short of it but you have 76 instruments that kind of choose between and hook them up however you want so it's like yeah we we organize them into genres that were again genres Reed derived from the gear that we know that people use but at the same time you can put the metal guitar with the upright

bass and and the world percussion drums and then with a click if you want to play with a click for some reason or with a kazoo or with wind you know like you can combine this however you want and then set it in harmonic minor and make the weirdest most epic kind of emo thing possible and it's it's hilarious like giving people the ability to do that it's like it's another way of connecting to music I mean you guys know the hilarity of the musician joke right that the average person doesn't get when it like the punchline is like and then he was using the pentatonic minor it's like oh my god to be out of that excuse me to get back to that question that David could you answer maybe what how much does the the genre Drive probably at least you could tell about the content releases right we must think about that a lot yeah so it's it's his popular actually the most popular it's like when you have 20 million active users at any one time thinking about what the whole broad spectrum of them are going to be interested in and the

niches and applying to them and then all that is tough and so yes you have to get the the pop for the hot 100 content and all that and the stuff that resonates for the pop culture and is even number one in Brazil you know but you know we're putting in we're coordinating with the Icelandic Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and putting in this really awesome flamboyant Paul Oscar you know we're putting his music in because you have when you have such a niche thing like we were tell you're talking about that awesome 18:10 system that yeah yeah Noise music you know if that was everyone that was there I'm guessing was super into it so like the people that are gonna go sing that Icelandic music even though the country only has 300,000 people like they're gonna be so into it and that's awesome as one last final thing before we take a few questions I just having

fun time listen to this you know obviously you know technology has changed music making fundamentally you know probably since people were banging bones together from when the pianoforte was invention dand you could suddenly play both soft piano and loud Forte or the engineers said well mr. guitar player you can plug it into the staff but snakes don't turn the volume past about eight because then you won't get an accurate representation of your guitar sound and it will distort which is of course is bad technology has we still Shailene object fundamentally the kind of music that is that is made how do you see just sort of in a quick wrap-up thought what you are doing as fundamentally changing the nature of humanity and through music certainly there's a lot of pieces of music technology that have created genres right I think we wouldn't have what we think of as contemporary electronic music without the tb-303 and

the 808 right these are these are things that that have enabled particular types of expression and I think you know if there's like a lofty aim that I could possibly have for a thing that I would build you know it's a thing that that is expressive within a limited set of means that can you know sort of be generative of its own type of genre work because I think genre is a powerful way of limiting a palette and allowing someone to sort of identify with the thing that they've made as part of that genre and I think you know that's sort of a big part of you know what we were doing we're playing around with remix and Fantasia but a thing that you know from a long-term perspective I sort of aspire to be able to create kind of an environment that has its own sound in its own feel that you know is is generative of a particular type of genre of music for us we view music as the original social network and just kind of a buzz phrase but I think it encapsulates what we're gonna try and do

going forward and that is completely to take this community that has kind of built itself and that we've nursed along of people that are all casual or closeted singers that are all collaborating together in 700 people sing a group duet of happy and all the stuff that's happening without us even pushing it we're gonna keep massaging and pushing that further and a you know pushing this collaborative environment to a point where people don't need to worry so much about sounding bad because you have a positive commuter behind them and just the idea that music can be good it can be bad but it can be expressive no matter what it is in there and it can be incredibly personal and incredibly connecting to a huge number of people across cultural boundaries across a whole bunch of different boundaries and I think going towards the future yes it's more about connecting all those people amongst all the different instruments and the different personalities everything and using music as a conduit for that I got three points let me see if I remember them all when

going through this because I thought of it while you started speaking now that might be gone first one is myself in a second ago first thing is I think we're actually coming up to like I feel like we're behind where music used to be and this is maybe just an idea I just started thinking about now when you were talking about like oh you know people used to get around the piano and play songs and sing together I really feel like what we're doing now with the music applications is kind of getting people back together connecting people back to music again which is something that is actually I feel and a lot of ways actually departed from our culture and we're not departed but definitely gone to an individual basis instead of kind of connecting as a community so in one way I see that that's that's where we're going but that's just to get us back to Ground Zero which is nice second thing is that second and third thing at the same time I feel that new instruments or

new ways of connecting with music are literally new windows into creating music like this is why a lot of musicians and I'm sure you guys know like you maybe started with guitar or you started with piano but then there was some point where you're like I want to learn how to play drums I want to learn how to play bass I want to learn how to play this like adjust this natural inclination came out and you started to play with those and other instruments and it made you play different it made you play different things you thought up different ideas you started making music in a different way that's incredibly important so all of these new things that we come up with whether it's controlling it on an iPad or a controller or DJ thing or maybe just even clicking around with a mouse in a da W all those different ways are actually influencing how music sounds like you were talking about with the 808 or with live or things like that the last thing I'm going to say is where we thought all of us are actually pushing music technology specifically in the field of games but pushing this music technology gives the kind of like gives the the pro audio

user more technology to make things to make different tools and different things that actually didn't exist before to get to kind of experiences that are new right like a lot of the a lot of the tech that I know you've made with going through and actually analyzing the the wraps and stuff like that or the stuff we've done the session mode it in the way you're going to make a product and then when you're done making that product you're like huh we had to make a lot of tools to get here and you can actually wire them together this way and it's like a way of growing on where you're at to actually make more tools to then go to the second point to make music in a different way and actually bring it further this is probably overlaps a lot with those guys but definitely filling in the gaps between traditional instruments and would Nick was describing as a solitary EDM producer in his bedroom hopefully you know a lot more different ways for people to make music at different levels of commitment from the lake I just want

to tap the phone in time versus like I actually am going to like dedicate years in my life to learning an instrument right there's huge range of people in between they're the guys who have given up on guitar twice so we can make tools for those people and let them you know keep making music instead of like if you read that conversation like oh you know I really wish I still played guitar like oh like we got you bro like here use this you know we're making that kind of stuff to fill in the gaps and I hopefully it'll be at all at all ranges from the amateur up to the professional and making those tools a little you know more usable so you don't have to you know dig through it like synthesizer manual to like learn like what the hell is this one knob do and why can't I hear any differences like actually we don't really need to show you that so we're not going to you know also I think it's all contemporary it's gonna make a big comeback right see don't contemporary gonna make a big comeback got to write

that one down I think we got time for a question or two if anybody's got something that we're gonna have to wrap up or go to the wrap-up room hi there first of all I just want to say hmm finger what sorry was okay all right first of all I just want to say thank you like to everybody cause like I'm like I started off doing music like with these rhythm games like I started off with music games like that's my bread and butter that's what I just love to do if it worked for those like if weren't for like amplitude or Rocksmith a rock band or sing or guitar or anybody else just keeping up this genre of game that seems to be dying I think I mean I think it's I mean I just want to thank you guys like so much because like this is just such a big part of my life the question like since I'm such a big part of the community on the music game community I know that a huge part of it is of the fan bases to have like original like user-created content whether it's like creating your own songs and implementing them in the game which is a little bit rare or if you just like takes like mp3s off of the internet and just like throw them into Tap Tap Revenge or something because I

know that that's such a huge part of just like the grassroots community but in my conversations that I've had with developers it seems like it's difficult to acknowledge that that's even happening cuz like you can't just say hey look at this cool dude who took a thrift shop mp3 and just put it in our game because then you get because then you're condoning piracy and then you have a whole bunch of copyright issues to deal with because you're not paying like you're not licensing their music so my question is do you really see this user-generated content as more of a boon to the game or a more like a hindrance and is there a way to promote this user-generated content without overstepping copyright boundaries we're very super good question it lends itself to a whole panel discussion we have enough time for quick answers and then we've let's we need to take it up into the hallway around I'll absolutely talk to you outside of this except to say that we can't say much except you're absolutely right and you may be happy in the future I don't know what any of his

questions I'm gonna say that you don't ask the easiest questions we tried really hard to absorb that energy with rock band Network and the Heil rockin days let people off at the wrong content offered up for sale it's a thing we knew was what was happening and we wanted to have happen and you know we ideally in the future will continue to support we love the community's input it makes Rocksmith so much so much better to have a really strong community and we've actually been fortunate to have people who care so much and we like that community input and we like having people actually help each other and do that great it's great to hear thank you so yeah I'd like to thank Matt John Nick and David thanks for letting your time here and I think this is the end of the GDC audio track for 2015 all right [Applause]