As Microsoft’s $68.7bn Activision buyout awaits approval, games giant files patent for AI music tech

Back in January, Microsoft issued jaw-dropping news that it was getting Activision Blizzard in an all-hard cash transaction valued at $68.7 billion.

Activision – just one of world’s most distinguished interactive leisure developers, publishers and distributors – is at the rear of strike gaming franchises like Warcraft, Diablo, Overwatch, Contact of Responsibility and Sweet Crush.

As famous by Microsoft in January, the deal for Activision, which employs just about 10,000 staff members all over the world, would see Microsoft launched into the position of the world’s 3rd-greatest gaming business by revenue, at the rear of Tencent and Sony.

The buyout has attracted world scrutiny however, from regulators in the US, as properly as the British isles, and the European Union.

Meanwhile, as Microsoft and Activision await information of the game titles giant’s destiny from these competitiveness watchdogs, the company appears to have been working on technology that could have huge-reaching implications for certain sectors of the music enterprise.

As noted by Movie Games Chronicle, Activision has been experimenting with tech that results in AI-produced customized music for players within a movie game.

Which is in accordance to a US patent filed by Activision Publishing in March for an invention titled, “Systems and Methods for Dynamically Building and Modulating Songs Based mostly on Gaming Situations, Participant Profiles and/or Participant Reactions”.

Activision explains in its filing that “Multiplayer on line gaming has observed explosive proliferation throughout the globe with entry to a wide array of age groups” and “while several functions of video clip game titles have develop into remarkably customizable, musical things are inclined to be standardized throughout all players”.

Hence, argues Activision, “there is [a] have to have for methods and approaches that crank out and modulate tunes unique to person players”.

“By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), an infinite blend of music and audio can be automatically created to avoid obtaining to manually make tunes/audio which then desires to be tagged for engage in centered on different situational queues.”

Activision patent filing 

The submitting clarifies that, “By automating the approach of what type of music is staying performed and to what depth based mostly on the problem, player experience, and many others., music and audio can build much more immersive and satisfying gameplay experiences”.

It adds: “By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), an infinite mixture of new music and audio can be quickly generated to stay away from obtaining to manually produce new music/audio which then needs to be tagged for enjoy based on diverse situational queues.”

In other words, model-new tunes, created by AI, reducing out the require for pre-recorded compositions and appears designed exclusively for a recreation, or tunes published by proven songwriters and recorded by artists, and then synced for use within a video game.

A single question this submitting will toss up is, what will the use of this kind of AI music tech for soundtracking game titles necessarily mean for the long run partnership among the $180 billion video game titles business, composers, publishers, soundtrack firms, and the broader sync sector?

Activision’s submitting points out that its personalised tunes could be specially customized centered on a amount of elements.

Some of individuals aspects include “a level of the player’s talent and/or practical experience, and based on 1 or more of gaming celebration(s) that a participant encounters”, as nicely as “the player’s reaction(s), the player’s response(s), the player’s enter(s) and/or the player’s movement(s) throughout the gaming events”.

“By automating the procedure of what variety of music is staying performed and how the songs is modulated, the video clip video game may perhaps become extra immersive, develop into more pleasing and supply gamers with a broad selection of customizable options in get to enhance the all round user experience.”

Activision patent filing 

The submitting carries on: “There is also a need to have for methods and techniques that correlate created and modulated tunes to the player’s achievement or failure all through gameplay and that use the correlation to strengthen the player’s overall performance in potential gameplay.

“By automating the approach of what form of music is becoming performed and how the audio is modulated, the video clip match may well turn out to be additional immersive, become extra pleasant and present gamers with a extensive assortment of customizable options in get to improve the overall person knowledge.”

MBW has extended covered the rise of AI-produced audio and the implications it might have on the new music company.

One particular of the most new superior-profile stories arrived from South Korea, wherever HYBE, the corporation behind K-pop stars BTS, acquired AI voice startup Supertone for above $32 million.

Established in 2020, Supertone promises to be in a position to generate “a hyper-realistic and expressive voice that [is not] distinguishable from true humans”.

The corporation applied this tech to “resurrect” the voice of South Korean folk celebrity Kim Kwang-seok, with the subsequent AI-created voice debuted on Korean tv exhibit Competitiveness of the Century: AI vs Human.

HYBE CEO Jiwon Park instructed the company’s shareholders on Monday (October 17) that Supertone’s tech will “serve as a key piece of the engineering sphere we intention to create” as the enterprise diversifies its small business for when its flagship act BTS take a break to do compulorsy military support.

Jiwon Park additional that “HYBE ideas to unveil new written content and products and services to our supporters by combining our written content-generation abilities with Supertone’s AI-primarily based talking and singing vocal synthesis engineering.”

Elsewhere in the video video games business, very last calendar year, a organization known as Reactional New music unveiled its possess patented technological innovation that permits true-time personalization of soundtracks and songs in the course of gameplay, and claimed to want to absolutely “re-write [the] regulations for songs and video clip games”.

Reactional Audio, whose President David Knox expended 26 a long time in senior world-wide management positions at EA, states that it enables any commercial or creation music to turn out to be interactive all over the gamer within a activity.

Reactional Audio was formerly a subsidiary of Sweden-based mostly tunes-tech organization Gestrument, but the two firms recently merged into a solitary corporation below the name Reactional Music Team AB.

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