I have been talking about this for awhile now. When I ever get the time to do it, I will most definitely do that. But is there a high demand for this? Most games now, if you hit pause it just attenuates the volume of the track. I dont see much of this going on unless the game was actually made for musical purposes like audiosurf.

Yeah, I think every electronic musician has fantasised about making music like this for a game,  unfortunately I don't know that game devs have the same fantasy .

For the old games, they might have done that though to save space mostly. For little big planet, it might of beenjust a creative thing. Which I would love to do by the way but that seems like its not a very common thing. I played a game off of new grounds that was like that. I am gonna search for it.

As a gamer I have enjoyed that. In recent past, I played a game 'Aztec Tribe' a casual game on a friend's PC. It had the same dynamic music thingie. As things got hot and bothered, the music got that much more intense. I have seen that in few other games as well but do not recall the names at the top of the mind. 

It really depends on what sort of game it is. games which do not have a timer I do not like the dynamic music stuff because it just pressurizes me/us as gamers but games which have some sort of time limit (time management casual games as an e.g.) that will definitely work. 

Even Strategy games when they have wars and skirmishes could have this to add drama. It would be good to see some implementations in strategy, adventure and survival games for sure.

I like the idea of picking a tempo,  say 100bpm,  and then writing all your music at that tempo.  then all the major characters and places can have their own theme song which intergrates with the all the other parts.  All you have to do is make them in the same key, say F#, and they will all pretty much just work together.  you could have all the music in one area in one key, say a dungeon in Bm then when you go into a city all the music is in C.  As things change in game you could alter the global tempo,  raising the players heartbeat.  It would really not be that hard for a musician to do, and it would be an awesome game experience. 

I remember the music in Secret of Monkey Island 2 being reactive to on-screen action, the first game using the iMUSE innovation.

>Yeah, I think every electronic musician has fantasised about making music like this for a game,  unfortunately I don't know that game devs have the same fantasy .

Well, I do, at least. ;)

In fact, what I'm dreaming of goes even further, although it does sort of leave the artist behind: dynamic music generation. That way you can get  a different sound track each time you play the game, and it can ajust to the mood etc. One thing I would need a music guy for though would probably be to teach the generator some rules about composition and harmonics and things like that.

Well I just submitted a draft to the DungeonHack forums for a generative music system

http://dungeonhack.sourceforge.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1035

They are trying to make as much of their game dynamically generated as possible, so it'll be interesting to see where this goes. 

If you guys would like to submit music for such a system, or have any ideas for improving it, I'd love to hear it :)

I did this as a demo for a project that I wrote last year implementing OpenAL in the Source (http://goo.gl/X3Dq8) engine. I wish that I knew there was interest in the way that it was done, because I would have posted the code.

Basically, I developed a system that had a set of tags called "conditions" that could be met. Each condition had an expression that would be used to evaluate to a boolean regarding if it was an active or inactive condition.

I set up a basic meta file which described the songs that the system should know about, and each audio sample had to be explained separately. It basically was a list of samples, what conditions they occur during, and what type of transition was needed for it to enter and exit the piece (hard or fade were the only options at the time).

So, for example - I used this track for all of the demoes in the system: http://goo.gl/WqJFK

So, in my test case I had the entire track playing without the drums. I defined a condition for 'combat' as well as 'sneaking'. Sneaking was 'combat' when there was no immediate danger. When enemies were nearby, it would hard transition the drums into the track at the proper beat timing. It seemed like it was a pretty good way to do it, as long as long as the conditions were done effectively (mine were pretty basic).

Just thought I'd maybe provide some ideas regarding how this might work in practice. :)