How was music created in Skyrim?

Bethesda decided to unveil a series of videos that present the sights, sounds and also music of its upcoming installment in the Elder Scrolls franchise, Skyrim. Audio director Mark Lampert pointed out that the world of Skyrim is, in fact, a combination of cultures, creatures and environments. Each sound is made of many other sounds which have smaller parts in them.

"It's more about the project as a whole, you know? If you work on any one individual sound effect and it sounds great in isolation it doesn't matter that much, because it's much more about how is this going to work in the entire game. So in a weird way you're mixing from the day you start," he explained. "It's not always that we have something in the game and we need a sound for it and I'll go out and record something for it. That happens, but it's much more often the case of, 'Here's a weird sound, I may use that one day, we should have it in the library - I should just record it now.' And inevitably in a few weeks you'll find some spot where you say, 'I've got just the thing!'"

Lampert collaborated with Elder Scrolls composer Jeremy Soule in order to make the layering of the music and to create something different for fans.

"I just sent Jeremy videos of me walking through the pine forest, walking through the fall forest, here's the tundra," said Lampert. "We wanted the wilderness exploration to be quite a bit more sparse, so the whole system - Mat Krohn, our audio programmer, did a lot of work getting the music engine reworked with new tools for me to play with, to where we can put in all the exploration tracks that you would normally hear."

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