I remember when I first saw a prototype of Chime. I was fascinated by it and how it created music as you played. When I was assigned to the project I was very excited about it and couldn’t wait to write some music for it.

The original idea was that new music would be written for the Chime Music Engine in such a way that we could utilise the functionality of the engine to its fullest. However it became quickly apparent that if we had all the original stems from an existing piece of music, we could simply ‘plug in’ the music data and let the Chime Music Engine ‘perform’ remixes of the track interactively, according to how well the player is doing.

The genius of the Chime Music Engine is that you never get the same piece of music twice.

Them in charge  quickly decided that it would be a better ’sell’ if we used licensed tracks from famous musicians and so we began the hunt for external artists willing to donate their music to charity.

The real difficulty in ‘plugging in’ existing music was finding elements in that music which we could chop up into loops and sound bites, categorize into Chime friendly elements that could be used by the Engine to perform its remix. Some tracks did lend themselves surprisingly easy to this task while others required us to get permission from the artist to further augment and embellish on their track adding content that did not exist in the original piece.

I remember spending quite a bit of time working on creating synthesizer sounds and writing riffs that were in keeping with the style of each particular track. These extra riffs are used by the Chime Music Engine to perform its unique remix and are triggered by the player as they build and create quads. The result is a completely unique remix every time you play!

The Chime Music Engine creates endless remixes of original music with a little extra icing on the cake from Zoë Mode! We hope you enjoy the results.

- Nathan McCree – Lead Audio Engineer