Traditionally, the focus in video game development has been on increasing the complexity and realism of video imaging to produce a life like portrayal of the action and characters. Only recently has there been interest in significantly improving the musical content in video games. AMEE™, a proprietary music generation software conceived at Western, can independently create aesthetically pleasing music for multiple applications, including video games. The music composition process is performed by recombining musical elements from libraries of non copyrighted material and/or creating new elements with pseudo-random number based generating modules. Furthermore, during composition, the operator can choose to dynamically alter the emotional characteristics of the music to fit a desired mood.

We envision several key application areas for AMEE™.  The engine could be embedded within application software to allow dynamic music composition within the application.  For instance, in a video game, the background music could be altered according to the game situation, becoming suspenseful when the character encounters an enemy during game play or happier when the character achieves a desired goal. AMEE™ could also form the basis of a stand-alone music composition tool which would allow a user to experiment with compositional elements. The design also supports the exchange of virtual musicians and musical elements in pattern libraries which can facilitate long-distance musical collaboration. Furthermore, integration into mobile communication devices (PDAs, cell phones) would yield an infinity of new ring tones and could be adapted to create new or reproducible ring tones based on incoming phone numbers.

• Composition engines tend to be monolithic, in the sense that the entities involved in music creation cannot be separated from one another. This design facilitates dynamic changes to composed music and parallelization of the composition process.
• Many composition systems are based on a limited music theory, which leads to compositions which lack musicality. AMEE™ emulates the process of composition a human composer would use: a piece has a structure (ABAB), it is based on a harmonic analysis (I-IV-V-I), and motifs (short musical elements), can be incorporated and repeated in a composition.
• The engine has objects created through methods that reflect real-world entities such as Musician, Instrument, Ensemble, Mood, and Ability. This makes it possible for the engine to be used by someone with little programming experience.