By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow

Delighted you’re here!  I’m video game music composer Winifred Phillips, and in this article series I’ve been sharing my music composition process for one of the top projects in my career – the original soundtrack for the bestselling video game Assassin’s Creed Liberation!  It was such an immense privilege to compose music for this awesome franchise.  In the previous articles in this series, I’ve shared thoughts about the cultural influences that can most effectively enrich the musical score of a game.  I’ve explored how historical research can inspire musical composition that immerses gamers in a time and place.  I’ve shared the thematic structure of the Assassin’s Creed Liberation score, starting with melodies for characters and locations, then expanding into themes as symbols for ideas.  In this article, we’ll be taking a closer look at thematic variation, and how it can best enhance the utility of our melodies.  If you’d like to catch up on the previous six articles, you can find them here:

1. Cultural Fusion: The Music of Assassin’s Creed Liberation
2. Time and Place: The Music of Assassin’s Creed Liberation
3. Melodies as Symbols: The Music of Assassin’s Creed Liberation
4. The Symbolism of Recurrence: The Music of Assassin’s Creed Liberation
5. Characters and Ideals: The Music of Assassin’s Creed Liberation
6. The Protagonist’s Motif: The Music of Assassin’s Creed Liberation

Themes can be applied to locations as well as characters.  The true power of those themes can be found in the way they are adapted and varied throughout the course of a game’s musical score.  As an example, when the Assassin’s Creed development team asked me to compose music for the New Orleans docks, they described a dangerous place – a popular spot for rough sailors and shady smugglers.  In fact, the New Orleans docks were famous as a refuge for skillful thieves, expert criminals, and irredeemable scoundrels. So I decided that for the New Orleans docks, I would compose a scoundrels theme.

I wrote the scoundrels theme to feel dark but mischievous.  Having a scoundrels theme was great for my work on this project. The idea of being a rogue and doing devious things was definitely a recurring story point, and I liked to be able to return to the scoundrels theme to bring that point across. For instance, the theme shows up in a highly streamlined variation during one of the action tracks supporting the main character of this Assassin’s Creed game – Aveline de Grandpré.

This music would be triggered when Aveline was being chased – so using a scoundrels theme there just seemed to make sense.  Beyond this theme for the New Orleans docks, I used the tactic for location themes multiple times across the Assassin’s Creed Liberation game.

For instance, the city of New Orleans itself had its own theme.  I wrote the New Orleans theme as a very dry and genteel Baroque composition that reflected the riches of the upper class and its position of power in society.

The New Orleans theme served as a symbol of the life of privilege that Aveline enjoyed as the daughter of a wealthy French aristocrat. Later, Aveline herself performs the theme on the harpsichord, with her father Philippe as an appreciative audience.

I think this cinema illustrates how the symbolic meaning of a musical theme can be made clear through strong association.  The subject matter of this conversation really served to cement the connection of that musical theme to an affluent and advantaged lifestyle. Later, Aveline dances a highly-stylized minuet to an extravagantly Baroque interpretation of that same theme.

In all three instances, the New Orleans musical theme is expressed in a different variation, but the melody is clearly identifiable.  Having this melody return through the theme-and-variation technique adds a layer of meaning to each scene in which the melody appears.  The theme also serves to connect all of these scenes to each other, interweaving a common thread of culture and identity to the narrative.

In the next article, we’ll begin a discussion of how thematic composition can deepen our appreciation of the villains of a story, while also fleshing out the history and culture of the setting.  If you’d like to learn more about composing for game music, you’ll find further discussion in my book A Composer’s Guide to Game Music.  Thanks for reading!

Winifred Phillips is a video game composer known for her Grammy® Award-Winning original musical score for the video game Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (listen to the official soundtrack on Spotify).  Her Wizardry soundtrack has also won a Society of Composers & Lyricists Award.  Phillips is known for composing music for games in many of the most famous and popular franchises in gaming: Assassin’s Creed, God of War, Total War, The Sims, LittleBigPlanet, Lineage, Jurassic World, and Wizardry.  Her music for Sackboy: A Big Adventure garnered a BAFTA Award nomination.  Phillips’ other awards include the D.I.C.E. Award, six Game Audio Network Guild Awards (including Music of the Year), and four Hollywood Music in Media Awards. She is the author of the award-winning bestseller A COMPOSER’S GUIDE TO GAME MUSIC, published by the MIT Press. An interview with her has been published as a part of the Routledge text, Women’s Music for the Screen: Diverse Narratives in Sound, which collects the viewpoints of the most esteemed female composers in film, television, and games.  Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.