[rcthompson]

Yeah, the first thing I thought of when seeing this was video game BGM. Ideally you would want some way to smoothly change the parameters over time as the player moves from one zone to the next, although you could probably cheat it pretty well just by having a separate track for each zone and cross-fading between them.

[saagarjha]

This was supposedly something that No Man's Sky was doing, was it not?

[applecrazy]

Yes, their sound designer Paul Weir did a GDC talk on the sound engine that they built for the game. It included things like procedural riffs on an existing non-procedural soundtrack, advanced spatial SFX, and had a demo of the engine in action.

Edit: here's the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKJ_XuQjjiw

[sjwright]

And Monkey Island 2—though that wasn’t generated, it was just a large pile of musical glue that let the music flow from one area to the next.

[mypalmike]

We did a similar thing with System Shock 2 for ambient sounds/music. We had zone triggers which fed into a DSL for queuing up/randomizing/looping audio segments. I built the runtime on top of an existing virtual-machine style audio playback system which had been developed for flight sims, where it was used to stitch together voices for ground control. I was a fairly junior dev at the time, and IIRC I was not able to implement the requested cross-fading feature in time to ship. Fortunately, the silence between tracks worked pretty well with the desired atmospheric effect.