By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow

Hey everybody!  I’m videogame composer Winifred Phillips, and in the course of my career I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of composing music for many famous and celebrated game franchises.  In this article series, I’ve been sharing my creative process in the music composition for the original soundtrack of the bestselling video game Assassin’s Creed Liberation.  In part one, we pondered how cultural influences within a game’s narrative can inform our work as game composers.  In part two we expanded that discussion to embrace emotionally-evocative locations, rich with history and ambience.  In part three, we began thinking about the role of music as a language of symbology, with melodies representing concepts and ideas that are important to the story.  If you’d like to catch up on the previous three 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

A symbolic melody in a musical composition is often called a leitmotif.  In this article, we’ll be exploring this idea further in the context of the music I composed for Assassin’s Creed Liberation, an awesome video game from the ever-popular Assassin’s Creed franchise.

Leitmotifs are designed to lead.  That’s what the name means – a leading motif. Leitmotifs lead the listener to connect a thought with a melody. This has the chance to make the music less abstract and more personal for the player.

The technique of connecting a thought with a melody becomes more potent from within the context of game music composition.  Most game music has an intrinsic quality that separates it from music for television and film.  We hear game music while we’re doing something (in this case, while we’re playing a game.)

In previous installments of this article series, we discussed how it’s easier to remember things we experience while we’re active.  When we hear a melody while we’re doing something, it tends to stay top-of-mind for a longer period of time, and it’s remembered more clearly.

However, the phenomenon goes beyond that.  Research conducted in 2001 for an Oxford University Press study came to the interesting conclusion that when we hear music while we’re doing something, the emotional connection with the music gets stronger.  The music has an even better chance to bring back both memories and emotions, which means that themes heard during gameplay have the chance to be even more evocative and personal.

Let’s explore that idea.  We’ve talked about how the main character of Assassin’s Creed Liberation, Aveline de Grandpré, is torn by her divided loyalties to her stepmother Madeleine and her biological mother Jeanne, and how the musical themes for Madeleine and Jeanne are used to demonstrate a cultural divide in Aveline’s past.  Let’s remind ourselves of what those two motifs sounded like as they occurred during the main theme of the game.  I’ve indicated where the motifs occur with some text onscreen.

The themes represent two different worlds, and because that’s such an important part of Aveline’s character, I wanted those two musical themes to follow her… to essentially pursue her throughout the game.  The motifs would act like symbols for larger ideas.

That’s one of the great things about motifs.  They give composers a symbolic language – similar to the way that expert writers use literary symbols to convey meaning to readers.  In order to demonstrate, let’s take a look at the way in which the stepmother’s theme appears in different contexts during gameplay. Here’s Madeleine’s theme during a one-on-one combat sequence. You’ll hear the theme played by the low string section.

This is a more dramatic variation of the stepmother’s theme – but it’s still recognizable. Are players likely to consciously recognize Madeleine’s theme while they’re playing the game? Probably not, but it’s not necessary for people to be able to spot the theme.  Leitmotifs can operate ‘under the radar’ (so to speak).  They can be subtle, and still be effective.

As another example – let’s listen to the stepmother’s theme during a mission in which Aveline travels by raft while dealing with enemy attacks.

You might have heard that Madeleine’s motif is even slower during this gameplay sequence.  Also, the melody now begins on the root rather than the fifth.  That makes this a more divergent variation on the original melody… but it’s still recognizable as Madeleine’s theme. The shape of the melody is still the same, and that’s the whole idea behind theme and variation. As composers, we state a melodic theme, and then later we restate it in a different way.  Maybe we express the theme with different instruments, or with a varied rhythmic structure.  Maybe we construct the theme in a minor mode rather than the original major, or we shape it around a different rhythm or tempo.  As long as we’ve introduced change, while keeping the underlying content identifiable, then we can call it “theme and variation.”

In the next installment of this article series, we’ll be going into more depth on the subject of theme and variation in the music of Assassin’s Creed Liberation.  Until then, you can learn more 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 Bluesky, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.