By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow

Hey, everyone!  I’m Winifred Phillips, and one of my most memorable projects as a video game composer was the original soundtrack for the video game Assassin’s Creed Liberation.  In this article series, I’m sharing my creative process for the music composition of this bestselling entry in the awesome Assassin’s Creed franchise.

This is the second installment in this article series.  In part one, we discussed the unique cultural heritage of the game’s protagonist.  As the daughter of an African slave and a French aristocrat, Aveline de Grandpré lived her life balanced between two culturally rich and highly-divergent legacies.  On the one hand, she enjoyed a life of wealth and privilege at the very top levels of society.

But on the other hand, she was deeply aware of the injustices around her, and worked hard to rectify them.  Much of the music I composed for Assassin’s Creed Liberation paid tribute to these important influences in Aveline’s life, exploring both her African and French heritage. Even so, I had more to research than the famous musical techniques found in French Baroque and African culture.  For instance, to address the influence of the Spanish forces occupying 18th century New Orleans, I studied the Spanish-derived passacaglia of the Baroque period – a very forboding musical form that sets a very dark mood!  I’ll be talking about this type of music later on in this article series (along with additional examples from French Baroque and African traditions), and we’ll be listening to some examples from all three.  But first, let’s consider one of the most fundamental roles that music plays in the context of a video game.

How music defines location

Music is very potent in setting a mood for a location.  As a result, location-specific musical scoring has long been a very popular technique in game music composition.  Music helps differentiate locations from each other.  It’s great at essentially compartmentalizing a game. But music can do a lot more to breathe life into a space.  Music can act like concept art.  It can create a very human and personal realization of what it’s like to exist in a location.  Plus, the intrinsic potency of music can convey all the emotional and kinesthetic realities that such a location would naturally present. That’s why I think that a lot of games could benefit from bringing the composer in earlier and allowing the composer to create musical inspiration for the team – in much the same way that the concept artist creates visual inspiration.

At its best, location-specific music can be very inspiring and exciting, for both the development team and for gamers having adventures in the world they’ve created. Music can add a depth of emotional resonance and atmosphere to the environments that gamers are exploring.  Therefore, it’s very important for the game composer to infuse each composition with an ambience evocative of the game’s world.  I’m going to include some music samples from a few location-oriented tracks now.  This first track is triggered when Aveline is exploring the Louisiana Bayou.

There’s an emphasis here on African percussion in the form of the dundun and clay drums, the balafon and African wooden flutes and rice shakers. I wanted the Bayou to feel like it was infused with African culture.

As a contrast, portions of the game take place inside Mayan ruins.  This new location represents a very different cultural foundation for the music, and a very different set of instruments. I wrote for the Mesoamerican ocarina, along with the rainstick, a set of hollow log drums, and shell shakers.

This kind of location-specific composing requires research and planning, and the music can provide a lot of inspiration to the team.  Doing this kind of research can keep the composer inspired too. It can reveal a whole host of musical textures, styles and structures, which then become available to us when we’re creating tracks.  The real fun is in combining these musical styles in different ways, looking for unusual combinations, and trying to challenge expectations.

As an example, let’s consider for a moment that the Assassin’s Creed Liberation game is not just historical – it’s also sci-fi. In the Assassin’s Creed franchise, modern day people have the ability to relive the lives of historical figures by hooking themselves up to an amazing device called the Animus (developed by experts from the nefarious Abstergo Corporation).  As a result, there’s always this sense while we’re playing the game that we’re actually time-travelers from the future, and the music needed to address that. Here’s a track that combines modern and historical styles.

In this track, the African rhythms and vocals are combined with both a futuristic synth and a classical soprano – so this went a little beyond dual messaging.  Essentially, the music delivers a triple message. It touches upon Aveline’s dual nature in the past, and the player’s singular perspective from the future – so there’s a lot of information conveyed about time and place.

These techniques can help us as game composers to focus on the power of music to immerse the player in a time and place.  We want to help an in-game space feel more personal and relatable, and we want to help the player feel excited about exploring the world that the team has created!

Now that we’ve immersed our players in a time and place, our next step is to use music to convey symbolic meaning to our players.  That will be the topic of our next article!  I hope you’ve enjoyed this discussion, and if you’d like to learn more, you’ll find more information about composing music for games 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.