Go forth

Lately I’ve been playing a little game called AudioSurf. It’s best described as a melding of music, Tetris, Formula 1 racing and strong psychotropic drugs. In essence, it takes any music you choose from your computer and converts the beats and tempo into a winding racetrack along which you travel in a little multi-coloured rocketship, collecting coloured blocks to make groups and score points.

Sounds absolutely inane, doesn’t it?

Yet for reasons I find it difficult to explain, it’s utterly compelling. The racetrack is synced so closely with the music playing that it links you intensely to the tune – strong rhythms produce regular bumps and hills, loud guitars speed you up while mellow passages slow you down again. Colours wax and wane with tempo in a way that I suspect emulates listening to Pink Floyd on lysergic acid. If this game had been around in the sixties, flower-power might well have persisted much longer. If you’re able to ‘feel’ the music (man!) you play better and gain higher scores.

And those points become important to you as, for every song played through, the score is automatically uploaded to the global rankings. The satisfaction of completing a tricky song and finding yourself at the top of the scoreboard for the entire world is immense. Want to have the world’s best score for Hysteria by Def Leppard (cheesy rock works wonderfully for this game)? Well you’ll have to beat me first. And if you do, I’ll get an email informing me that I’ve been dethroned so I can try and claim top ranking again – I’ve defended my placing once already.

If you’re someone who likes their music, it’s a new way to experience songs, and an excellent excuse to delve into those gigabytes of dubious-origin mp3’s sitting on your hard drive in search of those that give the best rides. Furthermore, AudioSurf only costs about a fiver when bought online through Steam so it’s cheaper and longer lasting than the drugs you’d usually need to obtain the same effects.

Quick endnote here: Unusually, I imagine, practically all the music on my computer – and iTunes reports nearly 13 solid days worth of it – is entirely legal, from CDs that I’ve bought myself. I think the number of tracks that I don’t own the original recording for is probably in single figures and I’d have trouble remembering which they are. I’m a bit old fashioned in that I like to have a physical CD, with the tactile artwork booklet that goes with it. That’s probably the designer in me pulling the strings there. I’ve also got great respect for the concept of a cohesive album of music – an emotional ride through the songs in the order the artist originally intended. The move to digital has lost that a little, with people able to pick and choose just those songs that they immediately like without having the chance for other songs to grow on them. I’ve often bought an album and found that tracks I didn’t originally like all that much gradually creep up on me until I realise that they are actually far better than initial impressions suggested.