What is DirectMusic?

It is a system for developing and playing back interactive music, or "reactionary / sensory" music. The music can change according to various terms and conditions, making it a very cool system for putting music in games and other interactive applications.

I have composed/designed the music for several interactive PC games using the Direct Music system. The result, although built up by samples and patterns, doesn't usually sound as "polished" as a full studio or Hollywood recording, but on the other hand, it definitely has a charm, it can be very memory/disk space efficient, and above all, it can react and respond to game events on a whole other level than any other known technology.

DirectMusic was developed by Microsoft, it works under DirectX. It works only on PC (Windows) and X-Box.

Here is a little DirectMusic demonstration that I've put together just to show some of the most basic concepts of how DirectMusic can interact with the user. Please read the !ReadMe.txt text file included in the zip!

DirectX v8.1 or higher is required. With Windows XP this is included as standard. With older versions of Windows, you need to install DirectX v8.1 or higher before running the demo.

Bjorn Lynne simple DirectMusic demo 1: dmdemo1.zip (537 kb)

Also check out these real game soundtracks by Bjorn Lynne.