While studying the Wwise 201 course on interactive music, I found that the Music Segment Editor could be used to perform aleatoric music like the score from Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption series. Taking inspiration from composer Woody Jackson, I asked my family members to improvise 8 bar musical phrases in A minor at 130 bpm with the simple direction of imagining the vastness of the American landscape. Afterwards, I edited their performances and added my own acoustic and lap steel guitar playing.
Pictured here is Wwise’s Music Segment Editor which contains the individual stems. From here, each stem was given a 25-50% chance of occurring in a given iteration of the 8-bar loop, except for the acoustic guitar and harmonica, which had strict patterns to preserve musical clarity. In this audio file, you can hear a couple iterations of this music system as it cycles through phrases.
