Procedural Music: Levels of Implementation
- Fae Blade
- Nov 25, 2025
- 7 min read
In our previous article, Procedural Sound: The Split Between Cost & Creativity, we showed how the real-time creation of audio can create a more immersive and rich player experience. In this article, we'll showcase examples of procedural music techniques, at different layers of importance and implementation, and showcase how they vary between simply enhancing the play experience
of a wider game, to becoming a core mechanic that the game relies upon.
Cyberpunk 2077
Cyberpunk: 2077 takes place in the dystopian Night City, and features a wide diaspora of people and environments for the player to experience. As each of these environments in the game needed to have their own atmospheres, the designers 'developed a dynamic reverb system that procedurally combines layers of small, medium, and large reverbs based on geometry' (Walden, 2021). These are primarily used for the sound effects in the game but are also used for the music, for example when you enter the bar named “The Afterlife” which consistently plays dark and heavy music, the reverb and bass feel more intense, and a delay kicks in to match the bar's rave-esque atmosphere. This shows an example of not necessarily procedural music, but procedural mixing. The implementation here works well, creating diverse and dynamic environments that can immerse the player, with less of a requirement to make true dynamic music systems.
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
Following on from the success of the first Death Stranding, which became known for its eerie avant-garde, synth-driven soundtrack, the audio team made a series of decisions that involved taking the music of Death Stranding 2 in a more ‘satisfying direction’ (H.C, L., 2025). One decision was to shift to writing music that was more gameplay-driven than narrative-driven, but with a focus on the extent to which they used procedural music to twist the soundtrack as the game progresses (Cotts J, 2025). Through a collaboration with Yoann Lemoine, also known as Woodkid, the studio created a soundtrack of songs that can seamlessly loop, stretch, and contort to run longer or shorter depending on gameplay, all without cutting lyrics as these are tied in with the game narrative (Cruz, 2025). Essentially, Woodkid needed to make pop songs that could ‘evolve all the time’, meaning when he gave a song to the game’s director (Kojima) he would end up giving him, ‘100 alternatives of that song that then the programmers could work with’ (Cruz, 2025). When it came to implementation, these 100 pop songs would then need to be analyzed and defined in terms of physics and mathematics, thereby allowing a series of samplers and sequencers to rebuild the song depending on gameplay. Through this method songs could be warped to almost any length, lyrics be dropped in appropriately and harmony can even be varied based on the player’s decisions (Cruz, 2025). One example of how this serves the player is during exploration; as the player changes routes, perhaps diverting from the desired path, elements of the song will drop out and new ones will come on. We are treated to a different listening experience while, crucially, not actually changing from the song (Abolfazl Galexy, 2025).
Now, why would the developers do this with the soundtrack rather than, as is common in many games including Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), do a similar thing with score? The latter would certainly be easier as they would not have the added challenge of working with lyrics, which cannot be chopped, nor edited heavily without sounding artificial (Cruz, 2025). The answer lies in the success of the first Death Stranding, in which the soundtrack was so popular players requested a music player so the main character could customize his own playlist (Ariedo, 2025). When making the second game the developers took this idea on board, giving players 18 games from the very beginning and plenty of others which can be unlocked through gameplay (Death Stranding, 2025). For those unfamiliar with Death Stranding, think of the ability to tune into radio stations across the Fallout games, and how the score is out of the picture while the player listens to old-school jazz numbers (Fallout 3, 2008). This is essentially what happens through most of Death Stranding 1 & 2. What separates Death Stranding 2 from the Fallout games is Kojima Studios’ success at combining this feature with audio that adapts to gameplay, managing to utilize a soundtrack that, in no small part, the player has control over, to guide the player and tie in with the emotion and narrative of what is happening on screen.
MINI METRO
Following on from death standing 2, Mini Metro takes the approach to procedural music within their game to another level, especially compared to what AAA game titles tend to do. Mini Metro is a puzzle strategy video game, It has a minimalist art style with an almost meditative pace to gameplay; thusly, a system that mirrors these ideas would be the best fit. The game is developed by a new Zealand based indie studio, Dinosaur Polo Club. At the time of development it was a two man development team. so they decided to outsource the sound and music in the game to an American composer, Rich Vreeland (also known as Disasterpeace). His aim was to create a soundtrack that could grow and adapt in parallel with the players expanding metro system. So, instead of writing a standard fixed soundtrack he instead created a procedural music system that was built nearly completely from real-time triggered audio samples. This allowed for the composition of the music to dynamically evolve based on the player's gameplay.
One of Vreeland’s main decisions was to not use traditionally written tracks or linear scoring but instead to have the entire thing built from samples. As he describes in an interview “pretty much everything you hear in the game consists of samples that are triggered in real time” (Vreeland, 2016) This allows for a more sparse and minimalist composition to form throughout the piece which builds upon itself, mirroring the gameplay in Mini Metro, which works together in a cohesive way.
There is no need for composing for cutscenes or narrative points within the game as there aren't any, so this allowed for Vreeland to map in game variables directly to musical parameters. So for example, as the player adds new lines, builds stations or reaches higher levels of congestion the music system can respond by adding new rhythmic layers, texture or harmonic layers. Each individual map contains its own unique sound palette and a new set of rules for the music to follow which results in a completely fresh soundtrack for each map as the variables will now be affecting different musical parameters. Vreeland specifically referred to this as the soundtrack “breathing” (Vreeland, 2016).
This process shares a close similarity to traditional vertical mixing, which is a lot more common with larger AAA games (Phillips, 2011), but where this starts to differentiate itself is that it has no underlying linear composition being mixed with pre-recorded layers. It works on a much more granular layer instead of triggering samples which are tied to the gameplay events (Sonorous Arts, 2020).
Songboy
Whereas Mini Metro devised a score that was manipulated and affected directly by player controls, some developers utilize the same tools to build instruments. A good example of this is from Aria Labs in the form of Songboy, a beat making game that utilizes granular synthesis and sampling to create an instrument that allows players to create tunes across a variety of genres within EDM (Aria Labs, 2025). Songboy gives players a selection of ‘makers’ with different sounds attached (drums, bass, keys, vocals, etc) which can be manipulated to change output. Players can choose options like ‘fast’, ‘arpeggiated’, ‘booming’, with probability to leave out notes from each groove being an extra variable, to deliberately craft a unique beat (Aria labs, 2025). While still in the beta stages this game is a demonstration of how far the techniques described in this article can be pushed to create music and soundtrack the gaming experience in new and exciting ways.
As procedural audio continues to develop as a technique in the larger arsenal of a sound designer, procedural music seems to be developing alongside it in its own unique way. The level of implementation in games varies heavily, from basic procedural mixing all the way up to song composition that has been gameified. The impact varies as well; it can be a background accent that enhances the player experience, or a tool meant to be directly used for the composition and arrangement of the game's score. It is exciting to see this technology develop, and what new horizons regarding the limits of composition that will be seen in the coming years.
Sources
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Cotts, J. (2025, July 9). Interview: Death Stranding 2 Composer Talks Connecting Music to Story, Gameplay, and the Player's Journey. Game Rant. https://gamerant.com/death-stranding-2-composer-interview-soundtrack-evolution-gameplay-music/ [Last Accessed 24/11/2025]
Cruz, C. (2025, June 13). Woodkid Says Hideo Kojima Changed 'Death Stranding 2' Because It Wasn't 'Polarizing'. Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/rs-gaming/woodkid-hideo-kojima-death-stranding-soundtrack-1235357959/ [Last Accessed 24/11/2025]
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