selectparks - Sound Based Machinima?

For a while now I've been dreaming up a context for music made using games; no i'm not talking about making pop on the GBA, or games made purely for audio performance, but sound/music/field recordings/'music concrete' composed by playing an existing game.

A hard genre to pitch perhaps, but I thought it's time to look at it before we add a new section to the archives. I've also included a couple of examples..

The name is often a bad place to start. Regardless, considering that 'Machinima' is a close cousin to what I'm talking about here, let's consider that term:

"Machinima (a portmanteau word for machine cinema and/or "machine" "animation") is both a film genre and a collection of associated production techniques. The term concerns the rendering of computer-generated imagery (CGI) with ordinary PCs and the 3D engines of video games (t ypically first person shooters) in real-time (on the computer of either the creator or the viewer) rather than offline with huge render farms." .. from WikiPedia.

With this in mind maybe we could we call it 'Sonichima.' Given that Machinima can be considered machine animated cinema, could sound/music made using games be described as machine animated audio? Is that specific enough? If 'Sonichima' is simply too horrible, then tell me about it and suggest something better.

Another consideration is intellectual property. Given that Machinima overtly promotes the game (something idsoftware recognised when they invented the demo file format in 1993) it's no wonder Machinima is generally encouraged by developers. Perhaps with sound-only Machinima, the promotional advantage wouldn't be quite so clear. This, alongside the viral legal precedents already laid out by the RIAA, may discourage the practice..

If anyone has work that falls into the same category, submit it using the submissions interface and I'll put it in the archives. 2004-08-27

Edited 30-August 2005: Removed old links to work, moved into Sonichima proper.