By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow

So happy you’ve joined us!  I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and I’m pleased to welcome you to part six of my article series discussing my original musical soundtrack for the awesome video game Assassin’s Creed Liberation!

The Assassin’s Creed Liberation game was the first title in the popular Assassin’s Creed franchise to star a female protagonist.  Set during the famously tumultuous events occurring in 18th century New Orleans, this bestselling game explored the tensions rippling across society as the city grappled with Spanish occupation and the American Revolution.  In the previous installments of this article series, we’ve discussed the evocative multicultural society in which the protagonist Aveline de Grandpré grew up.  While navigating the aristocratic society in which her wealthy father lives, Aveline has not forgotten the cultural legacy she inherited from her African mother.  Her life’s journey is a study of contrasts, as she wrestles with how to best reconcile her two very different worlds, and find her place and purpose within them.  In this article series, I’ve been exploring the thematic construction of the musical score for this game, and how melodies have assumed iconic roles to represent characters and locations within the narrative.  If you’d like to catch up on the previous five 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

At this point, I’d like to focus on the musical identity of the protagonist herself.

Aveline’s theme, like her mother’s and stepmother’s, is a simple motif.  Let’s listen to the melody first during a game cinematic in Aveline’s warehouse sanctuary, where she meets with her assistant and conducts most of her business.  Then we’ll explore how the theme was adapted to circumstances during gameplay.  In this cutscene, Aveline has just come home from one of her adventures.

You can hear that Aveline’s theme features a lot of upward movement in it.  It’s a theme that expresses yearning.  It feels hopeful but uncertain, as though she’s searching for something… looking for answers.

Writing a theme is a very instinctive process involving lots of trial and error. The composition process can take a lot of time before a satisfying theme is nailed down.  Once the theme feels right, though, it can be used in a lot of ways. After I’d developed this thematic expression of Aveline’s basic character, I set about adapting it to suit the various roles she plays within the game’s narrative.  For instance, here’s Aveline’s theme during combat, when Aveline is at the height of her powers as an expert assassin and freedom fighter.

During this combat sequence, we can tell that this is still Aveline’s theme, but now we’re hearing it adapted into a much lower register.  The theme is expressed more forcefully, with much more determination.  Even so, we’ve still retained that upward movement, so it hasn’t lost the yearning quality that it conveyed in its first appearance.  We can tell that Aveline is fighting for what she believes in, and throwing all her well-honed strength and great determination into her chosen cause.  However, the theme still retains a questioning tone.  She may be giving everything she’s got to this fight, but she doesn’t have all the answers yet.  There are still mysteries to uncover and secrets to reveal.  Moving forward now, let’s take a listen to Aveline’s theme during a much more important combat scenario.  This combat sequence occurs quite late in the game, when the stakes are drastically higher, and that tension is reflected in the music.

So we can tell that the emotion of the moment has really escalated here.  Aveline’s melodic theme now features a full choir carrying the melody on top of an emphatic orchestral arrangement, lending significant heft and drama to the moment.  Plus, the underlying chord progressions give her theme a much more confident emotional resonance, as she engages in a late-game battle with significantly more at risk. The upward movement of the theme allows us to sense that Aveline is still yearning and searching.  Nevertheless, she knows what she wants now, and she’s determined to get it.  The assertive rhythmic structure, along with the more epic arrangement emphasizes this new determination.  Introducing thematic variation has allowed Aveline’s theme to transform into a stronger, more demonstrative musical statement that’s able to communicate a lot of additional meaning.

In the next article, we’ll be examining how this effect can be applied to locations as well as characters.  In the meantime, you can find more discussion of game music composition 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.