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Abstract. The combination of music with interactive media enables new forms of expression, can expand the bandwidth of information flow by disencumbering and complementing the visual channel, and support the user/player in controlling and managing complex structures (e.g., in strategy games). Its associative power can be used to influence playing behaviour and decision processes. This, amongst others, educationally interesting potential lies idle! In this media theoretical and critical elaboration we intend to close the gap between music in static linear and non-linear interactive media. We will give a brief overview on media music perception, detail its historical development with regard to interactive media, elaborate and exemplify its narrative functions in order to widen the scope of the field where music meets interactivity.

How much time will a player spend in an interactive scene? For the majority of game scenarios this is impossible to predict. Therefore, their musical accompaniment is usually disposed to continuously loop until player interaction triggers a change. This approach involves an existential danger: Sooner or later the player becomes aware of the repetitive character of the ambience design; the game scenario emerges as a mere mechanical arrangement and loses much of its integrity.In this survey paper we systematize and discuss the common approaches to conceal musical repetition. Furthermore, we complement them by a number of approaches that incorporate arrangement techniques, aspects of expressive music performance, and generative variation methods that work actively against repetitiveness.

Sound can be used to give orientation, drag the listener's attention into a certain direction and provide navigational cues in virtual, as well as in physical environments. In analogy to the concept of visual pointers we call such sounds Auditory Pointers. While previous work mainly focused on the spacial localization property of sounds, we would like to complement this by using properties of the sound itself. Properties, like loudness, timbre, and pitch, can be used to sonify distance and direction to a target point. In this paper, we describe an exemplary implementation of respective sound synthesis techniques and investigate the effectiveness of different properties in a user study. The findings reveal big differences between the sound parameters and give clues for functional sound design.