GDC speaker Q&A: Elitsa Alexandrova and the music of Assassin's Creed: Origins

At the 2019 Game Developers Conference, you can look forward to an array of talks from speakers across the video game industry. During the week,you'll hear from industry legends, niche experts, and amazing advocates, many of whom will want to learn about you and your work as much as you do theirs. 

At GDC 2019, sound designer and composer Elitsa Alexandrova will be exploring the soundscape of two Assassin's Creed games: Assassin's Creed Rogue, and Assassin's Creed: Origins. To introduce you to Alexandrova before her talk, we reached out for a quick Q&A that you can now read below! 

Would you please introduce yourself and talk about your role in game development?

I'm Elitsa Alexandrova, a sound designer and composer working at Ubisoft Sofia, Bulgaria since 2007.        

Without spoiling it, what will you be talking about at GDC?

My presentation will be focused on the challenges of composing music for the Assassin's Creed franchise and more precisely, for Assassin's Creed: Rogue  and Assassin's Creed Origins: The Curse of the Pharaohs. I want to share my experience during this process - from the possibility to make the music direction of the game and composing the scores to the playing and recording different instruments and doing the implementation of the music in the respective game tools.    

What excites you most about the future of game development?

In terms of the audio progress in the games - the improvement of the technologies and the development of the sound systems and tools, which will gives us the possibility to have more flexibility to build adaptive sound design; to use the whole palette of styles in the music creation and to make the "world of the sound" in the games immersive and even more realistic.

Tell us about your favorite project you worked on in the last year (that you're allowed to talk about). 

My favorite project I worked on in the last year was Assassin's Creed: Origins - The Curse of the Pharaohs. In order to achieve authenticity in writing music close to the ancient Egyptian original (although there simply is no direct information on what exactly the music in Egypt was like :) ), I did my research and I was very excited to discover very interesting historical finds concerning the similarity between Ancient Egyptian and Bulgarian folk instruments. 

The usage of the old and non-tempered modes, which are typical both for Bulgarian and Egyptian folk music allowed me to create very interesting mystical music texture for the fantasy world of the Egyptian Afterlife.

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