For those wondering one of the things that makes the music neat in Elemental it is that it is broken down in to sub tracks. In most games these days music is just a bunch of songs. The engine picks which song it wants played when. Works kinda like you do with an MP3 player.
Ok, fair enough. However there is the possibility for more flexibility with greater storage. When you compose music, it is done in many seperate tracks. Each instrument, or at least kind of instrument, is on a seperate audio track. That lets you control the levels, EQ, positioning and so on of each one. This is good in that it allows the engineer to alter the sound of the mix as needed. However it takes a lot of space, and also of course requires all the DSPs to process the audio.
Well, Elemental seems to go half way on that. It has a few mastered tracks of different kinds per song that are balanced with one another. It can then create different variations by muting or fading one or more of those tracks.
For example the map music is composed of three parts: MapTheme1_BG.mp3, MapTheme1_MG.mp3, and MapTheme1_FG.mp3. BG is just the percussion, the drums, shakers, etc. MG is the harpsichord, harp, and some soft cellos. FG is the flute, oboe and the violins.
When you are on the map itself, all three parts are played, giving you the whole song. However at various events one or two of the parts can be cut out. For example when you call up the empire management screen, the MG track cuts out, and the FG track is faded back, giving you a much more percussive piece.
It is a really slick system in my opinion and allows for a lot of easy, and fluid variation. I mean not only can you have parts on or off, you can have multiple versions of a part. You could take the FG part of the song and transpose it to a minor key and have a slightly sadder version of the same piece, without changing anything else, and fade between the two.
In some ways it reminds me of the LucasArts iMuse from their old SCUMM adventure games. However that only worked using MIDI music (since that is music synthesized in realtime by the computer). This works on digital music, and really seems to be quite simple at its core.
