In the beginning of the Wwise-Music Cube level, the Wwise Wwizard explores a series of empty rooms, picking up necessary supplies in anticipation of what’s ahead. Without the urgency of monsters bearing down, the player may choose to explore the surrounding space for any length of time. This exploratory music is based on a chord progression that repeats every sixteen bars. The composer has prepared multiple versions of the theme, which include some subtle differentiation in the rhythmic pattern and instrumentation. To avoid making a predictable music arrangement, you’ll use Wwise’s Interactive Music Hierarchy to re-sequence the various segments on the fly in order to minimize the predictability of the order in which they are played. This is often referred to as a sequential approach to interactive music. For example, in a DAW, rearranging the music sections in a similar manner would require that you move musical regions left and right, or horizontally in the interface to achieve a similar result.

For the approach used in this lesson, the composer is delivering a set of audio files, each of which represents the full mix just as it sounded coming out of the DAW’s main output bus. In the following image from the actual DAW project, you can see that markers identify each of the six sections of the exploration music, but notice how there are a few measures of silence in between each section.

The gaps between each section are there so that when each section is played, there’s a bit of time for the natural decay of the instruments and Effects to be captured without the next part playing over top. Similarly, there may also be extra bits of music playing just before the logical beginning of the next section. This is usually in the form of a pickup note or percussion swell leading into the downbeat that begins the next section. Prepping the DAW project this way makes it easy for the composer to then provide each section of the music as a separate block, from which the overall musical theme can be reconstructed in Wwise in a variety of different ways.

You’ll implement this music into a Wwise project that contains sound effects that have already been integrated into Cube, picking up from where work done in the Wwise-101 course left off. In the 101 course, a simple music loop was added to one of the game levels. The music you’ll be integrating in these lessons will be much more compelling as you’ll now be taking full advantage of incredible purpose-built features for music integration in Wwise.