Brian Eno's Mutating "Spore" Score Reinventing Game Music

With games like Grand Theft Auto, Rock Band and Guitar Hero tripping over each other to license as much music as possible, at least one eagerly anticipated game is going in the opposite direction. When playing Spore, the latest brainchild of Sim City mastermind Will Wright, gamers won’t hear any songs they know. In fact, they won’t hear the same song twice.

Spore simulates the evolution of creatures from single-cell organisms through the space age, so the changes start at the very beginning: Make your creature an aggressive carnivore, and the music will be noticeably different from that of a plant-eating species. Spore uses procedural music, meaning that the music a player hears will develop and mutate along with their style of play. Iconic producer Brian Eno was brought in to provide much of these tracks.

Read the rest of this post