Martin O'Donnell confirmed Halo 3 's soundtrack would see a commercial release in a Bungie podcast. The suites are named after the nine Campaign missions and unlike Volume Two, are broken into separate tracks.
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The tracks are presented, similarly to the previous soundtrack for Halo 2, in a suite form. Since the interactive mixing of sounds in Halo 3 depends on 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. 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. 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. 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. O'Donnell also tried to avoid outside musical influences, as he believes that "Bungie should be creating culture, not being influenced by it." 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. The music was recorded by the Northwest Sinfonia at Studio X in Seattle, Washington. 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. 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. 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 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. 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." 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. Martin O'Donnell at the launch of Halo 3 in Bellevue, Washington
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The score was nominated for X-Play 's "Best of 2007" awards, under best original soundtrack. The soundtrack reached the Billboard 200 chart, and also broke the top twenty best-selling soundtracks and independent albums listings. The game's score and its soundtrack were generally well received. In addition to scoring the game, the music was used for promotional advertisements and trailers preceding Halo 3 's release. The score made extensive use of the piano, an instrument which O'Donnell used frequently for composition but that had not been featured in previous Halo music.
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The 2- CD set was released on November 20, 2007.įor the next game in the Halo trilogy, O'Donnell added new themes as well as bringing back and expanding old ones, some of which had never been recorded with a full orchestra before. Most of the original music was composed by Martin O'Donnell and Michael Salvatori, but also includes a bonus track, "LvUrFR3NZ", which was the winning entry in a contest held before the soundtrack's release. Halo 3 Original Soundtrack is the official soundtrack to Bungie's first-person shooter video game Halo 3.