Halo 3 Original Soundtrack - Background

Background

The score for Halo 3 gave O'Donnell and Salvatori a chance to rework and revise existing themes heard in the games, as well as create new ones. Halo: Combat Evolved featured more strings, while the soundtrack to Halo 2 featured conventional video game music staples such as guitars by Steve Vai; in an interview, O'Donnell noted that "to be honest, when I got to the end of Halo 2 I thought to myself: 'that was probably enough guitar.'" He intentionally made the score to the final game a shift back to the orchestral roots of the series, stating "I took an orthodox, almost formal approach to the trilogy." O'Donnell acknowledged that some games and movies used entirely different music with each sequel, but such an approach wasn't an option with Halo 3, the third installment of a trilogy: "The Master Chief is still green, Cortana is still blue, and so you're going to hear the monks and the cellos."

O'Donnell began by writing out the reworked themes and music he wanted to hear in the game, without knowing where he would eventually use the sounds. He approaches composition from the piano, and described his process as looking for something that "makes me go 'oh, that's a good feeling'". O'Donnell's approach to writing music for games is to put in the audio at the last minute of development, so that his music meshes with the game play in the best possible way; he still had not added the score when Halo 3 was demoed at Electronic Entertainment Expo 2007, less than three months away from the game's debut.

Unlike previous soundtracks, where much of the music had been synthesized on computer, the soundtrack for Halo 3 was recorded using a 60-piece orchestra, along with a 24 voice chorus. The music was recorded by the Northwest Sinfonia at Studio X in Seattle, Washington. Interviewed by some of Bungie's staff for the Bungie Podcast, O'Donnell noted that there was more "techno" and "tribal" sounds than on previous soundtracks. O'Donnell also tried to avoid outside musical influences, as he believes that "Bungie should be creating culture, not being influenced by it."

Scoring for a video game, O'Donnell noted, is different from a film in that a good score sounds like it is narrating what the player does on screen; Halo 3 uses an audio engine which allows music cues to naturally start, stop, and transition in response to game triggers. Working from his office at Bungie, dubbed the "Ivory Tower", O'Donnell worked with mission designers to set points in the game that trigger segments of music. Instead of pieces with a set duration, songs in the game have multiple variations that can be looped and arranged to fill the time it takes the player to travel from point A to point B. Since the interactive mixing of sounds in Halo 3 depends of what occurs in the game, O'Donnell instead "froze" the music into set suites and transitions for the CD, so that a listener playing the soundtrack through would hear a musical representation of the game. The tracks are presented, similarly to the previous soundtrack for Halo 2, in a suite form. The suites are named after the nine Campaign missions and unlike Volume Two, are broken into separate tracks.