Music as temporal disruption in Assassin’s Creed

Abstract

The Assassin’s Creed video game series incorporates real-world historical elements. While some historically derived musical elements are referenced from the time period and geographic setting of the game, in the first game of the series, Assassin’s Creed 1 (2007), these historical snippets are subsumed within a modern musical setting emphasizing digital sound. The effect is a bleeding-over of ancient with modern that mirrors the plot of the game. This new spin on the time travel narrative creates a disconnect for the player and invokes disruption in a number of ways: through plots, visual distortions and sound/music effects. Musically, disruptions invoke a sense of aural discomfort in the player, which mimics aspects of the game narrative such as the protagonist’s physical distress. In order to better understand the interrelationship between these components, this article uses graphic transcriptions to categorize the musical, visual and narrative functions into fiction, interface and hypervisual/hypersonic components.