Frotzophone by Adam Parrish
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SUMMARY
The Frotzophone is an interface for making music with interactive fiction. The topography simulated in the game is used to generate sound, as is the player's path through the game. A Frotzophone "performance" looks just like playing a text adventure; but in addition to playing a game, you're also playing music.
Video of the Frotzophone in performance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKdSyyGGDCI
MP3 recording of a typical Frotzophone session: http://itp.nyu.edu/~ap1607/audio/frotzophone/zork-sample.mp3
BACKGROUND
The initial impetus for this project came from my interest in maps: specifically, the intersection between maps, games, text and music. What do they have in common?
Interactive fiction has its roots in maps: Will Crowther's original Adventure was a faithful simulation of an actual cave in the Colossal Cave system. In his article _A History of Zork_[1]?, Matt Barton calls Adventure and Zork "interactive maps" (see also Julian Dibbell's _A Genealogy of Virtual Worlds_[2]?). Mapmaking remains an important part not just of authoring interactive fiction, but of playing it as well.
These maps are like any other map, in that they are only abstractions of the space they represent. As the game progresses, these abstract structures are gradually revealed to the player. The area of explored territory grows, and as it does, the connections among the map's nodes becomes apparent: they form branching structures, loops, and rhizomes.
The path that the player takes through the game has its own structure. This path is constrained by the map, but not defined by it; the player must choose which direction to go. Given a map that permits doubling-back, an infinite number of paths are possible. It's even possible to get lost. Movement is further constrained by the game's rules: puzzles that must be solved, obstacles and enemies that can hinder the player's progress, etc.
Here's where the similarity with music comes in. There's a "score" (the game map) that has a recursive, repetitive, and branching structure. There's a "performer" (the player) who progresses through this structure over time. The goal of the Frotzophone is to map the one kind of playing (playing a game) onto the other kind of playing (playing music).
[1]? http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1499/the_history_of_zork.php?print=1
[2]? http://juliandibbell.com/texts/history.html
Software:
Frotz (open-source Z-Machine interpreter) http://freshmeat.net/projects/frotz/
Inform (free/open source programming language and IDE for interactive fiction) http://inform-fiction.org/
Processing (open source multimedia programming environment) http://www.processing.org/
ChuCK? (free audio programming language/environment) http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/
