Fmod is actually a supercool if somewhat clunky, probably very early version of a Graphic User Interface (GUI) for software called, middleware, in the process of inserting sound into game programs.

What fools these software engineers be! Or maybe they know and its the marketing people, as usual, who have their heads in the past or some other dark place.

Maybe the engineers realize that, what they have on their hands with Fmod, a creative tool for modifying, merging and remixing tracks on the fly, is a new kind of music/sound sequencer that automates the scoring of media. I wouldn’t bet on it.

From the perspective of the engineers that make it, Fmod is an app running on a Mac or PC that game developers can use to program sounds and music into a game so they will be triggered by input from players and adapt to changes in the “game state” caused by the progress of the game or if a player goes up or down a level, wins or loses, goes from one scene to another, fires a weapon, misses or hits the target,  and so on.

Fmod is an off-the-shelf sound programming GUI that saves you the laborious trouble of writing code that triggers sound into the game by writing the code for you. You lay in audio tracks using the graphic user interface by dragging and dropping audio files and by setting automation for the audio files is triggered by game states and player input.

If your mind can contain the concept and try looking at Fmod as a purely musical tool, a  sequencer that uses audio files instead of midi controlled samples and with a modest range of DSP plugins. Instead of just having a single timeline as in a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), which is a one-dimensional view, Fmod has a vertical axis as well, call it the y axis. Music occurs sequentially, one note or arrangement of notes after another. With Fmod, you can also program notes or changes to notes on a perpendicular coordinate, which isn’t time based. For lack of a better simile, call it world-based.

You may imagine it in a colorful way somewhat like this: you are making love to a woman (or man), doing this, doing that and things are moving along in the direction of orgasm and suddenly, you change partners or reverse roles or change genders, maybe flip back and forth in a tempo. The sensual example isn’t just for humor or venal interest but to be honest about the sensual qualities and purposes of music and the part that music plays in our lives and especially in manipulating viewers in advertising, promotion and propaganda. I speculate that in the near future, since scoring for media has been reduced to cliche musical solutions, a program like Fmod will be programmed by engineers to score TV melodramas, ads and YouTube videos automatically, programmed by machines.

However, the hidden value of Fmod, which is of little interest to the marketing department of Fmod, whether or not the engineers understand it, is that this GUI is an interesting tool for other kinds of users than game developers, people who are artists for whom the facility Fmod provides for real-time adaptation, interactivity provides an ability to eventually take Messaien to the stars.

The moral of this story is that all marketers live in the past, worshipping success rather than the source of the success. They revere Mickey Mouse, Forest Gump and Lady Gaguh as if the human circumstances that gave these invention life. Check out Fmod.