By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
Hello there! I’m Winifred Phillips. As a part of my career in video game music composition, I was honored to compose the original soundtrack for the bestselling video game Assassin’s Creed Liberation. In this article series, I’ve been talking with you about the music I composed for that awesome game. This is the third installment in this article series. In part one, we discussed the unique cultural heritage of the game’s protagonist. In part two, we considered how music can bring in-game locations to life, infusing them with a sense of history and meaning. If you’d like to catch up on the previous two articles, you can find them here:
- Cultural Fusion: The Music of Assassin’s Creed Liberation
- Time and Place: The Music of Assassin’s Creed Liberation
Before we proceed now, I’d like to digress from the topic a moment to talk about video game music in live concert.
When I went to my first video game concert, I remember how excited the audience became when the orchestra started to play! Everyone was waiting for the most popular songs to begin. The concert wouldn’t always start there, however. Maybe the concert would kick off with lesser known pieces! Or maybe there would be long introductions that the audience didn’t know. Sometimes, it could take awhile before one of those iconic main melodies began to play.
However, the wait was always worthwhile, because when that special melody finally showed up… that’s when the big cheer would go up! It’s all about those famous tunes. Everybody recognized their favorites – the melodies that they loved the most! These were the themes that they thought were the absolute best.
Melodies stick in the mind, and game melodies can be especially memorable. That’s especially true when they are deployed with expert precision. When we associate melodies with special moments in a game, we’ve made our game melodies both memorable and meaningful.
I wanted to discuss game music concerts because they’re a great illustration of why melodies need to be top-of-mind for us as game composers.
Melodies as symbols
Melodies can be used as symbols to help establish and reaffirm identities – the identities of people, of locations, and even of ideas. When we associate a melody with one of these in-game concepts, we’re metaphorically throwing a dart at a bull’s-eye. We’re directing attention towards something that we want the player to notice. We’re saying, look here! This is important!
I’ll be showing you how this works by playing some musical examples from Assassin’s Creed Liberation so that we can discuss the intent behind them.
A musical theme can sometimes feel like a full-blown song, with a verse and a chorus. Other times it will be shorter, and at its shortest, it becomes what’s called a motif. This is a clearly recognizable melodic segment that may be only a few measures, or even just a few notes long. As long as the motif can be perceived and identified within the music as having its own special musical identity, it can function as a theme.
Short musical themes can be especially useful. To illustrate this, I want to talk a little bit about the childhood of the protagonist of Assassin’s Creed Liberation. We find out right from the beginning of the game that the protagonist Aveline de Grandpré has suffered a deep loss. Her mother disappeared when she was a little girl. I thought about how such a traumatic event would play a significant role in Aveline’s character development. She loves both her stepmother Madeleine and her biological mother Jeanne, so she’s got some inner conflict about that.
After giving all of this some thought, I decided that I needed to write two important musical themes. One would represent Madeleine. The other would represent Jeanne. So now, let’s take a look at one of the first cinemas from Assassin’s Creed Liberation. In this video, Aveline is waking up from a nightmare. You’ll hear both Madeline and Jeanne’s musical themes in this video, and I’ve indicated when they happen with some text onscreen.
The two melodies you heard were both short enough to be called motifs. They’re recognizable, but they’re simple. Madeleine’s theme starts low and immediately swoops upward, while Jeanne’s starts high and dips down right away. This helps emphasize the idea of the sharp contrast between the two women. Other than that, these are two very simple motifs.
In composing a melody for Jeanne and a melody for Madeleine, I’ve musically underlined those characters and affirmed their identities. However, you can see that the effect is pretty subtle. The player shouldn’t really notice it, but as the composer, it gives me a tool that I can use elsewhere in the game.
For instance, when I was thinking about the personality of the main character, Aveline, I considered the cultural divide that defines her upbringing. Her privileged life with her stepmother contrasts sharply with her heritage from her long-lost biological mother. These vastly dissimilar influences might cause inner conflict and turmoil, and perhaps these factors might never be fully reconciled. With this in mind, I decided to make this idea a central focus of her personality. The dichotomy of her dual heritage would be a defining characteristic, whether she was intermittently preoccupied on a more conscious level, or influenced by it subconsciously.
So, now that I’ve musically underlined the two concepts by virtue of the themes for Jeanne and Madeleine, I can now indicate that they’re on Aveline’s mind by making them recur.
The importance of recurring melodies
When a motif represents something in the story and gets repeated to enhance that representation, this turns the motif into a leitmotif. I’ll be discussing leitmotifs in more depth later in this article series – but first we’ll take a look at how the melodies for Aveline’s stepmother and her biological mother make reappearances in the game. Let’s start by listening to how Madeleine and Jeanne’s melodies sound from within the main theme of the game.
Here’s a section of an Assassin’s Creed Liberation trailer. The main theme plays in this video, and you’ll see Madeleine and Jeanne’s themes indicated on the screen when they occur.
When I used the two motifs in the main theme, I wanted to solidify the idea of a cultural divide by creating a musical divide. In the main theme we hear two distinct musical expressions, and they’re completely separated from each other when we hear them. Whether or not players consciously connect those motifs with what they represent, the players will most like feel a little sense of familiarity – and that’s exactly what we’re trying to accomplish. We want players to experience a faint little voice, somewhere in the back of their minds, saying hey! I know this. That sense of familiarity is a great thing! We now have the potential to help the player feel more connected to what’s happening in the game.
In our next article, we’ll discuss how these themes are reiterated as leitmotifs throughout the Assassin’s Creed Liberation score. In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about the craft of game music composition, 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 Bluesky, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
