SoundCraft: Transducing StarCraft 2

Mark Cerqueira, Spencer Salazar, and Ge Wang

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

SoundCraft is a framework that enables real-time data gathering from aStarCraft 2 game to external software applications, allowing for musicalinterpretation of the game's internal structure and strategies in novel ways.While players battle each other for victory within the game world, a customStarCraft 2 map collects and writes out data about players' decision-making,performance, and current focus on the map. This data is parsed and transmittedover Open Sound Control (OSC) in real-time, becoming the source for thesoundscape that accompanies the player's game. Using SoundCraft, we havecomposed a musical work for two em StarCraft 2 players, entitled GG Music. Thispaper details the technical and aesthetic development of SoundCraft, includingdata collection and sonic mapping. Please see the attached video file for a performance of GG Music using theSoundCraft framework.

Citation

Mark Cerqueira, Spencer Salazar, and Ge Wang. 2013. SoundCraft: Transducing StarCraft 2. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1178492

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{Cerqueira2013,
 abstract = {SoundCraft is a framework that enables real-time data gathering from aStarCraft 2 game to external software applications, allowing for musicalinterpretation of the game's internal structure and strategies in novel ways.While players battle each other for victory within the game world, a customStarCraft 2 map collects and writes out data about players' decision-making,performance, and current focus on the map. This data is parsed and transmittedover Open Sound Control (OSC) in real-time, becoming the source for thesoundscape that accompanies the player's game. Using SoundCraft, we havecomposed a musical work for two em StarCraft 2 players, entitled GG Music. Thispaper details the technical and aesthetic development of SoundCraft, includingdata collection and sonic mapping. Please see the attached video file for a performance of GG Music using theSoundCraft framework.},
 address = {Daejeon, Republic of Korea},
 author = {Mark Cerqueira and Spencer Salazar and Ge Wang},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.1178492},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 keywords = {interactive sonification, interactive game music, StarCraft 2},
 month = {May},
 pages = {243--247},
 publisher = {Graduate School of Culture Technology, KAIST},
 title = {SoundCraft: Transducing StarCraft 2},
 url = {http://www.nime.org/proceedings/2013/nime2013_146.pdf},
 year = {2013}
}