Uploaded February 2019 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Bartosz Szafranski examines approaches to structuring ambient through a video game adaptive audio systems, including FMod, Unity, and Futurust at Ambient@40, a two-day conference to appraise ambient music in relation to Eno’s milestone release

"Music Beyond Airports", edited by Monty Adkins and Simon Cummings, available now in hardcopy and free PDF download via Huddersfield University Press: unipress.hud.ac.uk/plugins/books/19

ambientat40.wordpress.com
archives.electricspring.co.uk/Seasons/2017-2018/Electric-Spring-2018

This presentation took place as part of the Ambient@40 conference, conveyed by Monty Adkins, Simon Cummings, Rupert Till, and Kristina Wolfe.

In the forty years since the release of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports the concept and aesthetics of ambient music have proliferated, influencing artists as diverse as Taylor Deupree, Steven Wilson, David Lynch and The Orb, infusing drone, microsound, minimalism and experimental electronic music as well as aspects of contemporary instrumental music. The aim of this two-day conference was to appraise ambient music in relation to Eno’s milestone release.

The conference took place at the University of Huddersfield from Friday 23 to Saturday 24 February 2018, running alongside the Electric Spring Festival (www.electricspring.co.uk).

/// CREDITS

Video camera operator: Andie Brown, Pablo Galaz Salamanca, Sam Gillies
Video edited by Sam Gillies

Title music: Music for Airports (1/1), Brian Eno. Performed by Decibel New Music Ensemble. decibelnewmusic.com

///ABSTRACT

Ambient music has featured prominently in original scores for video games ever since the more advanced hardware required to handle high fidelity audio became widespread in the 1990s, with outstanding examples including Trent Reznor’s Quake, Mark Morgan’s Fallout; more recently, Brian Eno’s Spore and Martin Stig Andersen’s Limbo, with numerous other instances covering an array of game genres and sub-types.

A crucial systemic development linked to the advancing game audio capabilities has been the growing sophistication and availability of adaptive/interactive/dynamic audio middleware. This sequencer-like software facilitates the implementation of music and sound that reacts to the behaviour of objects in a game, with control and automation of track parameters, modulation, effects, mix, and formal resequencing.

I am currently involved as a composer and sound designer in an indie game project entitled Futurust, which is a two-dimensional point-and-click adventure game set to be published in the third quarter of 2018.

store.steampowered.com/app/745980/Futurust

Since the beginning of the project, I have been building an adaptive music system, inside fmod middleware plugged into Unity game engine, to accommodate textural compositions which share many features with the type of fluid music described as ambient. In this environment, structural decisions are linked to specific extramusical parameters, which enforces a level of compositional clarity I have found unique and beneficial, with valuable possibilities beyond game audio. My aim is to demonstrate some of those possibilities by discussing the music system for Futurust.

///BIOGRAPHY

Bartosz is a composer with output in film, video games, contemporary dance, and the concert platform. His film scoring and contemporary dance work has been broadcast internationally as official festival selections in the UK, Colombia, USA, Brazil, Poland, Macao, among others. Most recently, he has composed for the short film Clean Shaving, the Kickstarter-funded point-and-click adventure game, and with the Studio for Electronic Theatre on their production of WE – premiered on 11-13 October 2016 at Camden People’s Theatre in London. As an academic, he lectures and undertakes research in composition at the London College of Music.