Waltzing with Blades: The Music of Assassin's Creed Syndicate

[Music] all right I think we're good to go our nice little intimate gathering here we're going to remember who of you who among you have chosen to come here instead of the Dolby panel that was pitted against us so thank you wait like I said I'm taking I'm taking down names here I'm Austin hi I'm Kristen from Ubisoft Quebec and we're basically just gonna dive right in here yup so I am okay so as i said i am christian from unicef quebec i'm the music supervisor worked on sss recently of course and on that game what I did was a music Direction music design editing of the music integration for a score and also initial research and design for the source music aspect of the game so in this

presentation what we're gonna talk about roughly is how we define the vision for the music in Assassin's Creed syndicate we came to work with Austin on the music direction for a game and afterwards an overview of a couple of systems music systems from the game and also aspects of the score so all this all began basically we're at a summer party for studio drinking beer everything was fun and there were rumors rumors flying around that our boss would announce you know the next big project for the studio and he did it was you know we were gonna work on the next main Assassin's Creed game it's any kid so reactions all around were you know people were surprised really Appy and it was an incredible opportunity for the studio because you know it was use of Montreal that the main games before now it was us you know our turn in the spotlight so we

wanted to make our mark at this game as for me what that meant we were without an audio director at that point so it fell on me to define the music direction for for that moment and our audio director on that project Lydia Andrew wouldn't come in until a couple of months later so I did research on forums articles editorials about what music means to gamers and to Assassin's Creed fans also I talked with the directors from the previous Assassin's Creed games to see how they came about defining their vision and their direction for the music and my conclusion from all that research was that the finding that vision for the music wasn't about finding specific instrumentation or style of composer it was about really finding what was the

philosophy what was the way of thinking behind we would get to those you know parameters the usual specifics so the next step was building a brief for the pitch process to find our composer and there was this word that kept popping back in my mind and it was potential you know for every game every game has its own unique set of parameters their own specifics so every game as their own setting they're there they take place in their own era that they place in their own fantasy world or maybe in space they have their own story their own characters all that translates into musical opportunities and for Assassin's Creed syndicate those opportunities you know it's a game about it's at the same

time it's science fiction and it's historical fiction that means it's a clashes of Jars of eras of instruments of musical influences all that is musical opportunities to exploit a Victorian London is also know chock full of musical opportunities to explore it's full of contrasts it's full of cultures follow you know all the social classes from the poorest factory workers that are richest you know banker walking side-by-side on the streets and it's also very vivid in you know the pop culture imagination everyone has expectations of what Victorian London should look like and sound like also our story you know jacob and evie the characters they're brother and sister they're siblings but there are also rivals so musical opportunity you know the assassins versus the Templars and you can go even more abstract like concepts like one versus

all past versus present poor versus rich all that musical opportunities which leads me for real now to this subtle way of saying he moved the slide early exactly through the pitch process now that we knew what we were looking for someone to fully tap into all those possible opportunities all that potential I built the the pitch brief that we were gonna send to the composers and as it was our first contact with the composers we put a lot of attention to the language the wording the tone in that document that so we were making sure that we would communicate or enthusiasm you know as much as possible we were looking to drive home the point that we were looking to be surprised by the pitches that we were ready for anything to bring it to take risks to to be bold basically which leads me to our

experience working with Austin on that pitch he responded to that call with an incredible pitch it was it was bold risky like we wanted and even more eros up to the challenge and basically surprised us with you know it was really you know I'm psychotic I I'm speechless so that should give you an impression I have to add to that before I kind of dive into my my forthcoming slice of this that what he's describing was this this pitch document which said the exact things that he just spelled out you know challenge us surprise us don't be overly caught up by the fact that this is Assassin's Creed which has a long-running you know musical history treat it as whenever it comes to mind you know and whatever your instincts are

in other words you're not beholden to the previous musical ideas in the in the prior games if that's not what speaks to you and of course I thought that they were bullshitting because I thought you know it's a long-running and widely beloved musical legacy within this franchise so surely they don't actually want to abandon that but I decided I would take them at their word and I would was fully prepared to never hear from them again and happily that's not that worked out and what's really interesting about that [ __ ] is it became really the template for what this core would become in the future and we would actually iterate upon what that [ __ ] was still Stickley to get to the final result for most of the aspects of this core so so I'm gonna play you what I sent them and by the way I will I want to bring up that who here submitted

questions on the gang Facebook page in advance a couple months ago I put it I put a post on and a bunch of people did although I think they're all in the Dolby panel right now and yeah exactly which by the way I'm sorry for my voice if I if I'm downgrading into a fourteen-year-old boy in front of your eyes here it's end of GDC voice but in any case so about about I I just wanted to make mention of the the questions we got in advance because I've tried to build basically all of them that we got into the talk and and because one of the questions involved the sort of evolution of and and the derivation of thematic material in the score and the reason bringing that up now is because that all began at this moment with the initial pitch because I looked at the material they sent which included things like the brief about jacob and evie as siblings /

rivals and that there's a sort of overtone of their struggling with you know legacy if their father and these kinds of things and so I I said this seems like something that is about the two of them as a unit as opposed to a kind of two different separate arcs that I wanted to think of differently it was all about their journey together and then also just sort of looking at the overview of the of the setting and when what that implies and so I came up with a thing that I kind of jokingly half jokingly because it's sort of accurate called neo Mendelsohn music and not and not actually because there's a period accuracy to that approach actually tend to avoid things that are designed to be period authentic because I figure the game setting is the period why are we going to be redundant to that through the score when the game is already solving that for us so instead despite the fact that this is sort of drawing from a period authenticity the idea was I want to do

music which feels like that of a pair of sarcastic assassins you know one of the things I really like that the game has a bit in common with Black Flag was that the main the main characters have jacob and evie they had a lot of personality and they had a lot of they weren't sort of like the glower ii brooding heroes that they're they're they're they're like young and arrogant and and and different from each other and but but nonetheless i'd say they have that you know in common that they were kind of they were kind of cocky and and and very aware of how kind of skilled they were and so i thought a musical language which has that nimble light on its feet quality but there's also a sort of sarcasm to it was sort of the idea so I sent them I did kind of a test recording that's loud and crazy person let's make sure we are sufficiently high volume no though I don't want to kill you all but it was fun cuz I said you know how about this

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so I said I sent more than that but that's kind of like a a taste of this sort of you know the the Neo Mendelsohn although funny enough well I'm getting ahead of myself can you could you all hear that all

right because of what the speaker is facing away from us it's impossible to tell what that sounded like was all right it's officially loud and not weirdly Phase II and stuff okay so that's just our perspective all right moving on all right so with the music for this game we're trying to achieve well a lot of things but our major goals were to ensure a natural music flow a musical flow in the game what that means roughly for transitions between cues we were we wanted to have as a little amount of fading as possible as you know as little cross fades fade ins fade outs as possible and go more towards on the grid transitions so you know on the beat on the bar transitions from one cue to another not cross fades what that meant for the music systems it meant that we would prioritize that music flow idea over gameplay feedback or responsiveness

of their systems as weird as that may sound also preventing interruptions of the music as much as possible you know how you can get tutorial screens that would pause the music we don't want that we wanted the music to play through that that also goes for loading screens for cinematics ins and outs and you know all that sort of cases you have the music played through that and to prevent starting and stopping you know constant starting and stopping of the music as much as possible especially for the combat music where that tends to happen a lot in open-world games you would get into you know five scenarios music would start and then you finish the fights really quickly in the music stops immediately with them which leads me to a gank forum question about how we worked me and Austin for asset asset integration in a game and

specifically Austin's involvement in that basically Austin didn't have any direct role in the actual implementation of the music in the game but it did have a very important influence on it because from all the discussions we had at the very beginning about exactly that the musical flow that influenced how you know my style of integration and editing of the music in the game yeah just to quickly jump on that I flew up to their offices in Quebec in January you know a year and change ago to kick-off the project and I you know he pulled up his his sort of working document of the of the plans for the score you know the the you know not so much a cue sheet yet as it was just kind of like a breakdown of systems and how yeah an outline of kind of what the plan was gonna be which was taken from I think previous titles and then you know molded and shaped based on

where you were planning on on going or where you wanted to go but what was so great is that on tato's titles like this it's not that common that you know one of the first questions from he and Lydia was you know and here's what we're planning what do you think and I said oh I get to have an opinion that's usually not a problem and there's one part of the [ __ ] thing that I skipped over because you know this could last for three hours it will we are locking yeah it is that real really wanted to have Austen's input from you know as early as possible from everything from the systems to the music direction and all that sadly for some aspects that this didn't happen I'll show you later but yeah so the the point being that I one of the first things I'm ever saying is as someone who has played pretty much all the prior ACC games I was always I always wished we had a little bit tighter control on for example the

combat music and because it's such a massive pet peeve of mine when you're playing games that have a lot of recurring sort of systemic combat that every time you sort of even so much as someone gives you a funny look this roaring epic music comes rushing in and then it's like oh no no we're cool and then it suddenly has to figure out how to stop playing and I just like hate that it's a bad storytelling and so I said you know can we can we not do that and he said already planning on not doing it and I was like oh god this is so good already it was so happy yeah because yeah and an emphasis on things being musical so that they can actually serve the experience and serve the narrative as opposed to being just these kind of mechanical byproducts of a very cool sort of clockwork machine that is designed it's like that's really not the point of the music even though we do want it to be pretty reactive so yeah he when it came to you know integration and wise and that was all taking place up at your office while I was in in Los Angeles but

but they were very very open to my saying you know can we do this can we do that coming to it and constantly offering my two cents yeah even though all the music was driven well for the open world part driven by news existence we didn't want to be slaves to that in the sense that we wanted to see all the possible gameplays and side activities and combat all the systems in the open world not as you know this thing separate chunks of gameplay but you know are they're all interconnected together and what that means for the music so yeah so getting back to that so for the music systems what we want to do is you know predict the players and tensions and score their stories and goes back to what I just said basically and only if it's worth scoring what that means is if you go in a back alley and fight a

low-level guy you know get done with it in five seconds maybe that's not worth having music over compared to fighting seven high level guys and you know being a very tense situation mm that's it yeah well III thought of it as this very kind of subtly judgmental aspect to the score where it's like some some some very easily picked off and it becomes wandering up to you and the music looks it looks at him and says you're not really worth my time yeah you know if you know trying to find out if the players going on a killing spree for a fan hour or just you know killing that one guy and going on his way was basically didn't the core of what we were trying to solve as a problem to music systems exactly um just a brief word I kind of obviously already touched on this so I can I can last through this but just for me a big a big thing when I'm starting any project is to try to

define as rigorously as I can for myself some kind of sense of musical vocabulary and I think Jason Graves mentioned this beautifully in his they've all talked the other day where he was because I I have the same mentality which is how can I sort of defense off as much as possible and restrict myself as tightly as possible so that things start to intuitively have this sense of that feels like syndicate that doesn't and the more I restrict options from my for myself the more things can have that quality like if it was just everything in the kitchen sink approach then nothing would intuitively feel right or wrong quite as easily and I really always try to make every project have kind of its own little musical universe so like I said in this one I kind of modernized 19th century chamber music approach and the reason I liked that was not because of the flourishing of chamber music in the 19th century though as kind of a cool benefit that is true the idea was something that felt light

on its feet something that felt like an assassin something that could easily turn corners as opposed to the kind of big lumbering dinosaur you know emotionally significant though it is the there's something kind of large and lumbering about an orchestral approach that just didn't seem right I thought you know the way they moved the way that the game's rhythm sort of plays out you know the this game the Quebec studio was really working really hard to make this game feel really fresh and really kind of like a sea you know you know rethought all over again and to really kind of rien spire people to be excited about Assassin's Creed and and so there was a snappiness to it that I was just loving and I said that's what that's what the music needs to kind of reflect it and it's too we don't want to go the big melodramatic kind of heavy percussion and a heavy sense that sort of thing I wanted to do to try to be a little bit more musically intimate with the caveat being that when

we're recording chamber music and we're pushing right in on these musicians it's actually way more visceral because you're getting bowstrings inches away from the mic and and and so it feels this in this tactile way right in your face and and so one of the one of the things I'm going to get to more in a bit though was also evolving that orchestration palette through the course of the game as well so so fencing office a small of a kind of lon musical playground for myself as I could but giving myself latitude so that it wasn't just this one thing for the entire you know 30 hours of the game or so can I just like to add what you just thought and talked about while being smaller ensembles you get more the textures of the individual instruments oh that's that turned out to be a really great contrast with how London Victorian London being such a busy filled you know

place filled with noise with all the action in there was a very nice you know contrast that turned out to be a really aspect of this cool really quickly just about this concept of themes because of the sprawling nature of the narratives of these games it's very tempting to assume that this kind of intense light motif approach would be the way to go and especially considering that we have sort of three or four principal characters in the game you have Jacob and Evie and then they have their kind of assassin cohort who they meet in London and then of course there's the main villain and I said you know I I actually don't think I mean I love I love writing themes conceptually but I do think it's generally an overused concept because it creates this crutch where you don't know what to do from a psychoanalytic standpoint so you just play the theme of whoever's on screen and my aunt my hata to do that is well but I see them on screen so what are you trying to remind me of it's the same reason why period music is redundant and

so I said furthermore Jacob and Evie are not in it from a musical standpoint they are not really different characters they're the the salient in the salient interesting quality was that it was all about them as a single sibling unit their relationship with each other and the kind of tension that goes through with the resolution and so it's kind of like they're two sides of a single coin and I wanted to make the just a single theme that was preoccupied with that dynamic and so that said the game lets you toggle back and forth but between the two characters and so I said I I would and you know there's missions where you play as one or the other that are very central to the narrative and then there's and in the open world you could just freely go back and forth and so I said I'd love to find some kind of subtle way to delineate them even if it's just because I think it's fun and so it was all about casting soloists and I I apparently like wild theatrical

soloists so on the left is sandy Cameron who's a violinist that actually she's been on tour with Danny Elfman and that's a shot from her Edward Scissorhands bent on his show and I was in the audience during the first performance of that and this person came out and just played the living hell out of this solo and I thought I don't know who that is but I need to find them and work with them on something and then it was very shortly thereafter that syndicate came in my lion I'm not done and so I said what if Jacob the brother is associated with these featured violin solos and then Tina who who I have worked with for many years she's the featured soloist on journey and many other things I thought that we can make her the sound of her solos that of Evie and so the premise being that the the score will kind of have these modular solos that can be switched in and out even in real time based on who you're playing has also

violin and cello you know weren't random choices basically they they run parallel in terms of characteristics with the personalities of the characters Jacob being more like an upbeat type of character and Evie being more grounded and that's how it turned out to be you know filing the Morse pry instrument and cello the more deeper voice yeah and also I did like it wasn't a central driving motivation but I did like the idea that there was a slight playing against sort of gender stereotypes like I was like it's sort of because that was the one of the first things a few people asked me he's like oh it's interesting that that's the next baby yeah that EB is the cello and I was like really it's well y-yeah but but but I kind of what I realized that apparently I thought well actually I like that so here's sorry this started straight away this is

just a demonstration of some of the systems in the game and how they play back differently based on which solo yeah well essentially exactly what I just said hold on let me just so yeah it's the same [Music] are threatened [Music] [Applause] [Music]

[Music] sorry simple you know incredibly simple from a musical standpoint demonstration of that but obviously it's a effectively the same cue recorded two different ways so just a quick word also on the kind of macro structure and I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna pick up my pace here so the I mentioned this earlier that it was important to me that the music have a kind of a broad evolution that was one that was I think one of the big changes from the initial documentation of the christian's on you know plans instead of saying okay we need just as kind of a giant Bank of combat music for example I said well what if instead of a giant Bank of combat music it was small banks of combat music that we gradually work our way through and as the player makes

their way through the narrative so that even in the open world the music is reflective of where you are in the overall progression and that way we can be reducing the amount of repetition because we're taking music kind of putting it on the table and then relatively quickly taking back off the table and I can actually communicate a story arc through purely orchestration and things like that you know by by manipulating the the overall palette as things go along so even the open world even in the Austin world exactly like if you're if you're just wandering the City of London and just enjoying you know exploring or side quests or whatever the music will reflect your overall progression within the game and despite the fact that you're not actually engaged in the narrative in that moment which was important to me because storytelling is you know of such paramount importance and yet an open-world game kind of pushes against the traditional constructs of storytelling and so I said I want to I want to have a system superimposed over the overall music and so I just wanted

to play you a quick example of the way I was kind of starting the score like these are little snippets from the combat music this is just a little mp3 that will play you know a bit from the beginning of the game a bit for the middle game but from later in the game and you'll hear you know it starts off with like combat music is literally just two violins sort of shredding with each other again that's you know that the open world combat music not the mission come back yes yeah there's a whole other there's a whole other thing there that we're like not even really gonna get into but yeah so you'll hear and then and then I flesh it out to the full string ensemble you know by the time they reach the middle gay and I start adding in woodwinds which was one of those I was like surely they're not gonna go for this I'm like I want flutes as my combat and they're and no one did well and and then and then I and then I ditched the wins by the end and it migrates into like chamber brass and strings so here's just kind of a taste of [Music]

[Music]

[Music] [Music] so I also you can you can you can here and release particularly for the composers in here the actual harmonic language is also evolving in there the idea that it starts off very simple and very kind of playing in a way the so that end by the end it can get actually you know quite a bit thorny or than 19th century music giver who actually got its honest I called it I the way I described it was I'm gonna go back in time and of dr. Mendelsohn but bring him to like the mid 20th century hang out with Bartok for a few days and they don't send them back and and and so that you know it's kind of a taste in that alright getting a little bit into the combat music system you know we won't go over everything but

that one's a stranger interesting because it's by far the most complex dynamic music states in music system in the in the game so it was built based on my experience working on the music systems on Assassin's Creed 3 and Black Flag and on their DLCs and they had all these cool ideas in there like the notion of having different states in a combat scenario like are you hiding from the enemies are you being chased that would have different music cues for for each of those scenarios intensity levels based on the number of enemies you're fighting is it a small petrol or are you being ambushed by 10 guys that would have different accuses also your elf level are you about to die stuff like that and location-based the variation of the combat music and black flag the music the combat music would be different based on which island you would you were on so that was all good which leads me to our goals for the combat music in syndicate we want to

score the players combat scenario you know tell score is story in the combat predict his intentions is the only killing spree like I said earlier or is he just fighting one weak dude and it's over in a few seconds a variety keep the data streamlined for the combat music system which was much harder than it sounds and you know stay focused on keeping the musical flow as good as possible and this was the first version of the combat system the chart and you can see there's a problem there pretty obviously yeah it's it's very complex but I ended up doing is just adding my own ideas to the existing concepts from the previous games you know it's an exponential increase in complexity there were a lot of transition cases but you know possible transition cases which means a lot more potential musical flow problems

which we were you know trying to avoid and a lot of music to produce which is another set of problems and this is what we ended up with roughly after a lot of iteration of playing the game we realized that we didn't need all those states and the music being very dynamic it shifts around a lot there's a lot of stuff going on and it's doing it's actually doing the bulk of the work that we wanted the system to do and it was doing it better just by you know playing on its own there would be all these little accidents you know Appy accidents happening you as you were playing fighting guys the music loop would play and you would get the impression that it would react to what you were actually doing in the game where really it was just doing its thing and playing there's no system involved so that was a really interesting side effect of the music being very complex and that's such a

recurring motif I feel like every year at GAC is there's inevitably the we set out to design a really reactive system and then we discovered the power of happy accidents and realized that doesn't need to be as reactive as we thought and so I feel like you know there's this dichotomy of the adaptive versus non adaptive music and I and I would actually argue that it's or that the it's a spectrum of the degrees of that activity of the music and that were as an industry in general we're kind of sort of zeroing in broadly on what that happy medium is you know musicality and playing out over over linear space for the sake of musicality versus type you know marriage to the player experience you know and as music designers will do designers all that work technical people it becomes very easy to fall into the trap of making this huge really complex cool system and it's actually you know making your life harder not easier I'm not even serving as well as a

simpler system exactly a couple of mechanics from the combat music system threat threat level thread values those are you know they determine the intensity of the music level the music that's playing it's a sum of values assigned to game elements and variables like what type of enemy you're fighting at the moment are they weak archetypes or strong archetypes they'll have different values and have different influence on the entity level of the music also your player level versus the enemy level will change is value so if you're much of a much higher level than DME you have a smaller value so less influence on the like the total threat level so less influence on the entity intensity level of the music next there's the cooldown state that replaces what used to be a victory cue when you

finished a fight it's actually a slow transition back to silence or to the next combat it's it's a it's a one-shot cue of music about 20 seconds long that leads me to the idea of chains if you get into another fight before the cooldown you know 20 second cooldown ends you get into another different set of music that's called the second chain and that's our mean to have variety in the combat music through you know for long combat scenarios where the player would get into multiple fights in quick succession so which is very organic to the way the game is designed because it's so easy to just create a sort of a train of enemies what are you thinking out of it and you go running and you actually bring a lot more so the cooldown kicks in and then actually you end up bringing a reign of hell down on yourself and the music's actually ready to go to kick back in as opposed to the system starting over it's pretty

important and that came from the idea of trying to tell a story and think oh you know the game events are interconnected there's a single fight event but what if you know in a movie if you'd have someone fighting these group of people then fighting that other group of people then that other group of people it would be scored and you know there would be a progression there so that was our mean to try and achieve that next there's the character switch so what we just talked about how if you're playing as Jacob or Evie you would get the violin or cello solos or actually different parts of the music and that's another way to achieve variety also the game progression sets you art an example or you're out if you're early in the game you'll get one set of combat music if you're late in the game you'll get another set of combat music with all the involved parts so different cooldowns different everything basically so here's an

example [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

[Music] and you can see also I couldn't I couldn't resist the temptation and when the when you're creating the cooldowns for the higher intensities later chains it would almost always be a scenario like this where it's at the culmination of kind of a recurring rewritten and revamping combat scenario and so I just to me there was just something he resisted we fought about having these like authentic Cadence's that that as

you're leaving no no no vault and bomb because you're like clearly walking away from this thing that was a lot bigger than whereas the other ones tended to drift out more subtly which was just me kind of applying a general nerdiness to to you know the way the game would actually would actually play out so looking back at the results for the combat system you know main takeaway I got from all this is like I said earlier all the AP the little happy accidents that happen where you let the music do its thing instead of trying to have a system that's leading forward all all the music and that happens if your music is very dynamic and all that not necessarily for different styles of game music but it it makes me wonder like that's an open-ended question as music

designers we tend to want to control in a very microwave the music is that really always the right way depends on the type of music but in this case definitely not and there's a lot of things to improve in that combat system sadly most of that system was in place before Austin became involved and that was a production imperative next time I definitely like to have the composure more involved from earlier on there's weird behavior sometimes it kind of has a mind of its own with all the little moving parts involved it's not you know Skynet levels of awareness but it's it does weird stuff sometimes it doesn't take allies into account in your fight scenarios and they do speed combat they speed up combat a lot so you do get sometimes what we were trying to avoid which is starting and stopping in quick succession sadly you know basing the

threat level on your you know the players damage output instead of is level relative to the enemy's level Wood has been probably a better you know better statistic to base the tread level on because it's a more direct reflection of this combat effective effectiveness basically a better handling of many quick game events happen in quick succession and you know there's are some music cues that play very rarely because of how the system is built and that could have been managed better yeah in other words some of the some of the sort of downstream high-intensity chains end up becoming almost like musical Easter eggs low intensity low intensity downstream chain but yeah exactly because they can end up being quite hard to trigger because you have to basically be in a long running low intensity battle there a combat situation which is actually kind of renderer

yeah we're gonna we're gonna actually skip this and because we don't want to lose that time for question yeah we'd really like if you have questions but basically yeah just the long and short of it is there's a whole system in place for one of these big you know one of the big classic AC tropes is the is the reach high point which is where you go up to the top and you your leap of faith and there's a bit there's a not a terribly elaborate system but there is a system there so there and moving on and moving on yeah a little bit we'll find a way to put that out there I'd like to quickly get over this because exploration music it's a kind of hot topic for the Assassin's Creed music fans rooftops music was our solution for that basically it's exploration music that's triggered when you you hang on on the rooftops area it's based on your elevation in the game world and that triggers the music for exploration why

only on rooftops basically that was to avoid cluttering the yo-yo mix at the street level we had a concern from the very beginning of the production about how this game would end up feeling being very busy otherwise because London is such a busy city we had carriages we had trains we had you know tugs screaming at you from the other side of the street and all that we didn't want to add more noise to that so rooftops also my theory that Explorer type players they will tend to climb up they will tend to go on the rooftops to watch the Sun set the Sun Rise to look at that train crossing a bridge all over there and that seemed like the better place to get the most bang for our buck for the exploration music and you know it's a simple system really it checks for what district you're in what hour is it and it picks the appropriate track for that there's a variation and night variation and also your game progression will trigger or not vocal tracks depending on your game

progression yeah because I I said I want to have the soprano solos that are singing in English text derived from nan Tate's speaking of Easter egg yes libretto from the Purcell Opera Dido and Aeneas but I you know with my own melody but those texts and I said and I can kind of comment on what's going on in English you know I said there's so many of the kind of ethereal vocal solos I said I I like the idea that you know you go up on the roof and you're looking out over the city and this kind of wistful music comes in and the soprano sings right at you you know peace and I are strangers groan and and it's like oh that I kind of that's that's a bummer and but I was like I like that I want and they were and you know again such a joy working with Christian and Lydia they were totally on board with that so it's a simple system but it's one that is checking a lot of yeah a lot of variables side missions and side activities I only say about that we ended up using that game

progression idea for the side missions the 1000 story stuff all the investigations and stuff then it's generate tracks that are not composed specifically for the missions but they change depending on your game progression if you're in sequence eight versus if you're in sequence four you'll get different music and yeah so that turned out to be a cool idea applied to a more generic situation and you know that could be explored further in the future yeah exactly so in other words be you know because there were so many side missions I couldn't write they wrote over three hours of music but I could have doubled it and still not been able to cover everything and but there would be you know cues that are reused for a lot of different side missions except that depending on winning the game you do it it triggers different music so that it's in line with the overall macro progression in a single playthrough it's difficult to perceive because you only do it once but which is actually the idea is it should just feel like it's just organically chasing whatever you're doing whatever your story is exactly a quick side note about

source music you know music in the world the street bands and all SF we wanted each district of the city to have a distinct detailed musical life to them so we define a list of songs from the era and different band configurations that would fit the mood and type of each district so you get more folk type bands in lambda you'll get work songs and southern you'll get music all singers on the Strand you'll get brass bands in the parts of Westminster and there's even details like passerby walking about bands and they'll pick up the songs that the bands playing and start coming it to themselves now that's really cool turned out really cool and we almost didn't get it which leads me to district things in the score we asked ourselves what we could do to take the source music aspect further you know a black

flag at the sea shanties and that turned out to be a great success but we didn't want to copy what was done before going to have our own little you know thing so that's how we came to the district teams which are you know popular songs from the era and they act as things for each of the city's districts each one of them have their own song and that's used for the rooftops music the reach high point music the side activities and of course the source music blamed and the bands and the street musicians actually played those songs too yes the idea is that you know you hear someone on the street playing a folk song which would these at work you know these were researched authenticated who who period authentic songs and then as you go up on the rooftop the score actually picks up this thing and puts it in to the you know through the filter of the actual score which was to me a really wonderful way to mix up what I was doing this was I you know I thought of this as Lydia's the audio director is sort of big brainchild because she was

she's from London she was very preoccupied with you know really carefully choosing these songs that had a lot of personality that was very you know particular to the to the area of the city that we were that we were looking at and I was invited to participate in the in the selection process which was really wonderful because I was looking at him from the angle of compositionally what will I do with this yeah - and so here's just kind of an example [Music] [Applause] [Music]

[Music] ready game [Music] you [Music] [Music]

[Applause] you know so you get the idea these little melodic fragments that you end up hearing performed a lot there's a lot of musicians in the city in quick succession it seems a very obvious but actually some of them are really more subtle like the champion Charlie one was not the vocal line doing the champion Charlie melody it was the actual right um string call important and that one was actually particularly tricky because the Mets melody so Nancy though sundown babbitt oh by the way you're all going away with that in your right yeah us too that's why of course when I was orchestrating it it's very dramatic you know so then the last sort of like an

amazingly fun thing to do on this was the murder ballads so these three dashing Ozzy's are a group from Melbourne called tripod and I had just done a I had just done a show with them about a year ago called this gaming life we did to our production with the Melbourne Symphony of songs like a cabaret show with full orchestra and I was madly in love with working with these guys and and Lydia brought up the idea of okay there's gonna be all this source music throughout the game what if there are original songs kind of tucked away inside there that we're passing off as other period songs but they're about the events that the citizenry is witnessing throughout London so you know as an assassin you take down some high-profile public figure and then shortly thereafter as you're just walking through the city you hear someone singing about that public figure being assassinated it's like wait

a minute listen about me and so we said let's write these songs to kind of tuck into the game to just flesh out the world even more and they're actually kind of remarkably difficult to find but it's a wonderful I you know I got a lot of messages on Twitter and things for people who happened on there's that were like oh wow there's a thread on reddit of people looking for the murder about it yeah so he's today we bring a different kind of play here dub you go cool with feasting on an old [Music] pearl anyways in your targets [Music] [Music]

someone's take a look [Music] they so that was a little bit on that just one incredibly quick word here was just that you know the the Murder Ballads by the way was the most fun time I've had in terms of the only time in my career has my deliverable requirement been sheet music which was pretty awesome and but you know we recorded the score at Abbey Road the you know the normal I can get into it into the time the one question we're going to have time for and subsequently out in the hallway as the case may be onto you know this whole process of but this standard you know create mock-ups send them to

them do my whole prep process and then off we went to the Abbey Road and flew through huge volumes of music and then just want to make one final note I am often advocating for the value of being divisive and and and I definitely practice what I preach on this game because this has been the recurring motif amongst long-running HD fans I know if you look at the top and bottom comments from just one of the random YouTube videos basically this is the worst score ever written and also the best score ever written and and and I I'm actually ok with that I'm I I like that we kind of challenged people and some people completely loved it and embraced it and we knew you know we're making such an about-face from the previous AC games that there's gonna be some that don't like it or in this case dear god no I hate hey hey this mister wintry you gotta go over to discuss this

you gotta challenge people yeah so anyway I just thought it would it was valuable to shine a light on the fact that we we didn't think we would please everyone and we were correct and so anyway we literally do have only a couple minutes but there's a microphone right here the housekeeping note don't forget about doing your evaluations when they show up on your phone but any question yes mr. du Domenico thank you for this I really enjoy Black Flag and I can't wait to play this game so thanks were you challenged by the fact that you knew that you had to create these varying levels of intensity when you were composing or did you do that after the fact oh for sure it was yeah I was designed from the ground up with that system in mind it was definitely not like write a piece and then cuz they're distinct cues they're not like cue with added drums or something like that it's definitely completely distinct music you know words and it created some

challenges for him as well cuz like I would say okay I think that you know maybe it's gonna be a faster tempo so he's having to figure out transitions where there's a pretty pretty massive tempo change happening you know within theirs is in a queue basically and things like that barely know layering it's all this thing queues and yeah the layering is pretty subtle and in the layering is mainly I would say the biggest feature of the layering is actually these soloists the violin versus the cello sort of decision awesome yeah that's great thank you thanks man hi thanks for the talk by the way that was great thank you so you kind of skimmed over this at the end but did you create mock-ups during the process and if so how did you overcome the fact that I mean it's a lot more difficult to do effective mock-ups for chamber so I overcame that by being really lucky because I was working you know Christian you know you get the sense probably that he's very technically savvy but you

don't know is he's also an incredible musician himself and so they're the sort of leaps of faith not to make an AC pun of are required in because I basically said early on I'm gonna send you mock-ups and they're gonna be god-awful because I'm going to be using all solo string samples and so and they're gonna phase if ever I have them in unison and it's just going to be an ugly mess and and and he and Lydia both are like that's fine and and and honestly I I basically did no revisions of the entire score like we the very the first combat cue we moved quickly away from this very curated like Bach style you know daddy daddy daddy better - the more waltzing idea and once we locked in from that it basically got no pushback on any Q of even minor changes and and including reactions that were the classic situation of you know getting a note and realizing oh they actually like the cue

but they don't like the mock up I was very lucky I didn't deal with any of that there was this thing in this project about trust and being able to ear further than the markups hearing what they're gonna sound in in the end it wasn't always easy but the fact that the not really and the fact that the pitch no there really wasn't any way to make those mock-ups sound even close because because it was so much based on the musicians interpretation and you know the actual emotion they would put into it and the pitch being live out a lot too you know extrapolate from the markups oh yeah that actually that is how I bought that trust is when they said well you send us you know your pitch I did an out of pocket recording session of the full-scale production of the school or as I was envisioning it and so that way I could say here's a mock-up of this here's the final before

before we've even gotten started so you can hear the trajectory in between those once they heard that the mock-ups became less of an issue because they could always go back and listen to the recording I had done before we even started on the score and say ah so that's the that's the place we're headed so then you make that mock-up extra bad on that first one so that there I'm going to now help making the mock-up extra bad alright I think we are probably Thank You Minh last question and all all answered as we're clearing out no no I'm inviting you but you gotta go right now thank you he's actually rated to do preview question in film production like you you have the film it is finished and you write the music then you go to the recording session right spread your streamlined process but in this case especially when like doing mock-ups was really difficult but you still probably had to deliver stuff like to be approved

by Ubisoft where there are different stages and that the game is constantly evolving adding new content etc how do you handle that production process at what time do you choose to record it to the matarese thanks to Drew yeah absolutely it's a great question I'm gonna give an incredibly sick synced answer so we can clear out of here for these guys but the but the basic answer is I said to them what is the absolute layer state that I can get you the recordings because I do not want to put myself in a position of having to music edit the hell out of these recordings if something doesn't work quite right but also there were certain aspects of the score like there were a bunch of cues that required only solo violin for example like you know a single spawn Q or something like that I was like those I can do whenever I can do those and those are easy to redo but when I go to London that's that's a one-shot deal and so I just pushed it as late as possible and we work together to say you know I don't want to be dropping a giant amount of music on him so that it gets screwed in the implementation so it can't be too close to the end and so but that was basically the answer it's just deliver as late as possible and again they were

very trusting that that was gonna be okay and they were even willing to when the initial announcement came out of the game you know like 83 and things like that you know the instinct was we should record some of this so we're putting our best face for and I said I wouldn't I said I'd rather put mock-ups in the e3 we put all of it for all of our effort and all of our budget words you know the final result yeah because they're not other projects they front loaded recording sessions before the sake of their PR and it actually hurts the game in my opinion so anyway thank you all so much