Interviews

Deadly Compositions: Jesper Kyd on Assassin’s Creed, Unreal Tournament 3 and Kane & Lynch
By Louis Bedigian

“If I only wrote what I was told to write my scores wouldn’t sound the way they do.”

What do Assassin’s Creed, Unreal Tournament 3 and Kane & Lynch have in common? Very little from a gameplay standpoint. Musically, however, they share the compositional work of Jesper Kyd. “It seems a bit crazy that these three titles all came out at the same time,” he says. “I’m glad to have some new music out there, since The Chronicles of Spellborn was delayed as was The Club for which I composed the main theme. After working on Gears of War it’s been a really busy couple of years.”

Best known for scoring the Hitman series, Jesper Kyd has also contributed music to big games like Gears of War (concept music) and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (cinematic music). How does one come up with the appropriate sounds for each game? Kyd says he does this through experimentation. “It also helps that I have a lot of experience writing and implementing music for games,” he notes. “Often the developer has an idea about how to use the music in a logical and proper way such as action music for action moments, stealth music for sneaking, suspense music for suspense, and so on. I try to come up with additional ideas when working on a project and I feel that’s the job of the composer. If I only wrote what I was told to write my scores wouldn’t sound the way they do.”


Assassin's Creed has been over hyped – not without merit, but still over hyped – from the day it was announced. When in the development process did you come on board, and did the hype have any effect on you, good or bad?

Jesper Kyd: A few months before the E3 2006 debut of Assassin’s Creed I had a chance to play the game in Montreal and I knew right away that the team had created something very unique. To me Assassin’s Creed feels like one of the first real next generation games where the team has managed to do something no one has done before.

Most of the top next generation games do something in an established category very well, perhaps the best it’s been done to date. BioShock is the best first person shooter I have ever played, Mario Galaxy is the best platformer I have ever played and I think Burnout Paradise will probably be one of the best racing games. Assassin’s Creed really looks like nothing else out there and when combined with the setting of The Third Crusade, it makes the game very unique. Being able to create music for the Christian, Muslim and 3rd religion for the Assassins in Masyaf is also something that doesn’t come along often for a composer.

On the development side, who was instrumental in getting you materials for the game to inspire compositions, and what direction did that developer(s) provide?

JK: I worked closely with Karl Lamoureux who implemented the music as well as getting me the materials for the gameplay mechanics and cinematics.

I was asked to come up with a tragic emotional mood and I also added a deeply spiritual sense of awareness to the score. The darker aspects of the score feel more primal and ritualistic, mixed with the meditative sound of the Assassin’s religion.


Jesper Kyd’s music is unreal.


At the moment I have yet to play the finished build, and all that I remember from E3 was that the music sounded good and was dark. What more can you tell us about it?

JK: The Assassin’s Creed soundtrack is emotional, melodic, dark, and epic in scope. For an overall theme of the score I worked on adding tragic elements of the Third Crusade into the score. I mixed this together with the feel of spiritual awareness which was a huge part of life back then.

Damascus is the proudest of the cities and a Muslim populated city. The music here uses more traditional Middle Eastern arrangements. I recorded Muslim male vocals, whispering noises, chanting and prayers; ethnic instruments such as the Ud (a middle-eastern guitar), Ney flute, mizmar (snake charmer / reed-based instrument), Mijwiz, Buzuq (duduk), other live hand percussion and traditional Egyptian instruments.

For Jerusalem, I mixed thematic elements and instruments from both Damascus and Acre to represent the clash of two religions. The musical tone is deeply moving, emotional and spiritual featuring full chorale music, solo Gregorian priest chanting and whispering references from the Bible recorded in Latin and acoustic guitar. Orchestra and strings also make an appearance to represent the strong Western influences of the Holy city. Additionally there are solo female performances including Arabic singing, Bulgarian and other western style vocals.

The Assassins have their own beliefs and I treated this as the third religion; a meditative creed that has a strict belief system, yet within these 4 rules everything is permitted in order to get your task completed, including killing. So naturally this is a different kind of spirituality but it’s still very spiritual. In general, there is a dark and a light side to these 3 religions. In the score, Jerusalem and Damascus has light with different degrees of darkness, since there is an underworld atmosphere out there which kicks in when you dig deeper under the surface in the cities.

A current trend in sound development is, if only for hype purposes, to say that the game has dynamic, interactive music. Did Assassin's Creed or any of your recent games take this route, and if so, what about the music progression makes it truly interactive?

JK: There are many different ways to create interactive music, but just to clarify, lots of top next-gen games only use what I call event-based music. Meaning once you reach this area or solve this puzzle a music track will play. This track usually only plays once and then we are left without music until you get to the next event-triggered place in the level. I think we can all agree this is not interactive music and this music works more like music does in a movie. This is a fine way to use music and some of my scores are also used this way, but not UT3, Kane & Lynch and Assassin’s Creed. In these games there is music almost all the time. With Assassin’s, however, we made sure to create some pauses when the player is exploring without moving the story forward.
 


They say you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. As it turns out, you can’t be a thug without breaking a nose either.

Regarding Kane & Lynch, this game comes from the makers of the Hitman series, which you've also worked on. Kane & Lynch has similar camera work and other Hitman-style gameplay elements... Does the soundtrack fit into Hitman's universe as well?

JK: Not really. Hitman is more stylish and almost operatic in tone. There’s almost no limit to the music styles we have explored in the Hitman series, but the Kane & Lynch score stays in a dark and desperate place.

One of the things that have really helped build awareness for Kane & Lynch is the better-than-average voice-overs and the number of times the lead characters curse. Do you worry this could have the same effect on the game as some curse-heavy movies: in the end, people can't recall what the music sounded like, but they can tell you every four-letter word that was recited.

JK: I’m not worried about that. I think Kane & Lynch has some of the best voice acting around
and I hope people will remember that more than the curse words. I think gamers know how hard it is to get the voice acting right in a game and hopefully the awesome acting job that was done with Kane & Lynch is appreciated.

Tell us about your involvement with Unreal Tournament 3 and its soundtrack release.

JK: I worked with Epic on the score and was first asked to write the Necris music. Then I went on to write additional music for several other maps including a robotic mall, a traditional Asian map
and more. I wrote six complete in-game music sets. Each music set consists of six different parts such as action, intense, victory, suspense, ambient and intro.

I have almost an hour’s worth of music on the soundtrack, all my music is on the second CD of the soundtrack album.

How did this score differ from your others? It sounds like you did your thing and Rom Di Prisco did his. Were there any collaborative moments, or was this essentially two separate (but, with the developers' direction, cohesive) scores brought together for one game?

JK: It would have been fun to do some collaboration, but we worked on our own with music direction from Epic’s Audio Director Mike Larson.

What were some of the "modern sensibilities" (as noted in a recent press release) that you added to older Unreal Tournament tracks that were re-recorded for this game?

JK: The first UT scores have been created in Mod programs, which use samples in a lower quality as well as limited music channels. An entire five-minute mod track typically takes up 0.25MB and that’s the size for the raw un-compressed music. Other, more recent UT games have used a more orchestral approach, which Epic wanted to stay away from. Rom and I worked (separately) on creating futuristic music with modern electronics and beats. There are also remixes of older UT tracks which embraces the new UT music philosophy treatment.

Thank you for your time.

For more information on Jesper Kyd’s music, visit www.jesperkyd.com.