Is the music affected by what's happening to the avatar in the PU? For example, when you drink from the alcohol cabinet your spatial awareness, your vision and the control of your character go. Are there things in the universe that would affect how you hear the music, like a grenade going off and tinnitus in the ears?

Well, it's interesting because we've got the split between diegetic and non-diegetic. Diegetic is in the world, so in the situation that you are. So you hear music from a radio, that's diegetic. Now, when you hear score, like you would hear in any kind of film, that's non-diegetic. So nothing in the game would really affect how that would play back with regards to sound quality, because then you're bridging the gap between the two. But certainly for anything that happens in the game, so if you've got music coming from a radio or PA and a flashbang or grenade goes off near you, that's an attack on the senses. So as well as how it would affect you visually, there'd also be supportive audio effects, taking out the top end, the typical thing, people bring up a high whine and stuff like that. But I don't think there's anything that would change playback speed or quality of playback. But obviously the game responds to action in the game. So if you're doing nothing, you're stood around in FPS, you'll get ambient stuff. And then if enemies appear and combat starts ramping up, all the music responds to intensity and mood. And that'll blend between different intensities of music and music suites and stuff like that.

Again, it's one of those things where if you make the score, the dynamic score, too reactive, it can devolve and dissolve into something of a mess. So you have to be quite careful and fussy about what you tie it to. So if you did tie it to certain things that are easy for it to be reproduced at a high rate, that can just lead to stuff that doesn't really give you anything good.

And a big bugbear for both of us is when a music cue happens before the actual action in the game is perceivable. Like a stinger.

Some people like that. Some people like almost to get gameplay cues from the score, and I've noticed some games do that, and that's fine if that's the way they want to go. I just think that should be more something that the game audio does, as a proper real informational system. Obviously, these rules can be broken and bent depending on the situation, but my general rule is that there should be some other information stream, and then the music in the score can be apt to confirm that, perhaps. Because you just don't want it giving the surprise away before it really happens.