Adaptive Musical Soundtracks: from in-game to on the street

We describe the challenges of creating location-based adaptive musical soundtracks, which we try to address via the iterative development of daoplayer, a tool to create such media experiences. Daoplayer is broadly modelled on the functionality of computer game middleware, functionality we argue is missing from most tools freely available for location-based experiences. We chart the development progress and use in practice, identifying the emerging challenges and outlining our responses to these along the way. Our focus is broad, taking in technical concepts and infrastructure, in addition to the creative concerns of the composer. We reveal that our tool was largely successful in delivering fine grained 'musical' soundtracks, which on the one hand highlights the similarities between computer game soundtracks and location-based soundtracks, but on the other hand we note a number of key distinctions.