Background and motivation

Motivation

The goal of our project was to build a framework which would allow the user to load in any song file and have it generate events to alter gameplay. The game we chose to affect was Tetris. An overview of tetris can be found here .

Implementation

1. It is a relatively simple game to implement. This allowed for more time to be spent on the signal analysis section of the program, and less on the game implementation.
2. Despite its simplicity, Tetris has a surprising number of variables which can be altered to affect game play. This gave some freedom in how to implement the events generated by the song.

We chose to affect the game in three primary ways. The first of these is the fall speed of the pieces, which was correlated with the volume of the sound file. This makes it so that louder sections of the song cause the pieces to fall faster. The second aspect we chose to affect was which piece the player would get next, which is correlated with the dominant frequency of the music at that particular time. Finally, we added a visualizer to the game, which pulses any time a strong beat occurs in the music.

These variables were chosen because they are clearly visible to the player of the game, making it simple to verify that the signal analysis is working correctly.