At the achingly hip SXSW (South by South West) conference that merges tech with anyone else who might be interested Marvel announced Project Gamma.
In summary; it’s music that plays along with your comics.
It’s a little more complex than it appears at first. Normally the way to assign music to comics would be to create a score or soundtrack. This gets expensive because you have to do it for each release.
Not only that but musical scores might be wrong. That’s to say the music might not reflect your view of the plot. A panel could show a superhero bursting into a scene, you might think “Oh no, not this arsewipe again” but the music might play something far more heroic.
What Project Gamma does is play an “adaptive, non-repetitive score”.
Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso has been talking to press. He insists that the writers he’s shown the tech too have been impressed.
“What’s going through your head when you read Thor: God of Thunder? Is it classical music? Speed metal? A little of both? Most writers have scores in the back of their heads. Kieron Gillen suggests a score in the back of Young Avengers,”
So it sounds like Project Gamma might solve the problem of repeating tracks on loops but still might come up against the challenge of having writers dictate musical interpretations to their works.
We also need to see how Project Gamma deploys. I read my comics via Comixology on my Nexus 7. That’s something both Marvel and DC have steered me towards by action and inaction. I suspect unless Project Gamma is compatible with that then it may battle for my attention.
Alonso is upbeat, he told CNET;
”I have no doubt that fans will respond positively to Project Gamma.”
What do you think Project Gamma will achieve?
