Jeremy Soule

Jeremy Soule (born December 19, 1975) is an American composer of soundtracks for film, television, and video games.

He has composed soundtracks for over 60 games and over a dozen other works during his career, including The Elder Scrolls, Guild Wars, Icewind Dale, and the Harry Potter series.

Soule was born in 1975 in Keokuk, Iowa to a public school music teacher father and a graphic designer mother.

He became interested in music and symphony orchestras at the age of five.

Soule began taking piano lessons at an early age and became entranced with music, even writing music notation in the margins of his math homework; after his teachers and his father realized his talent, he began taking private lessons with professors from Western Illinois University when he was in sixth grade.

He claims to have earned the equivalent of a master's degree in composition before completing high school; however, as he never enrolled in the school, he did not earn a degree.

He was split between trying to become a concert pianist and a composer when he grew up; he ended up deciding to become a composer once he realized how difficult it would be to do both.

While playing video games as a child, Soule came to believe that the experience they created could be greatly enhanced by having a better musical score.

After completing high school, he took a year to create a portfolio showcasing what he felt video game scores should sound like.

Soule sent the tape to LucasArts and Square.

Square very much appreciated the portfolio; he does not believe that LucasArts ever listened to his tapes as they had a "no unsolicited package" policy.

Soule began working at Square in Seattle only two weeks after first submitting his demo tapes.

Soule was promptly given the task by Square to score Secret of Evermore.

The finished game features an untraditional score incorporating ambient background sounds (like wind blowing and ocean waves) into the music and utilizing a more mellow orchestral sound.

Part of the reason for this was that the sound program used in Evermore was not up to the technical challenge of what Soule wanted to do with it, forcing him to work creatively within his limitations.

When Ron Gilbert of LucasArts left to form his own company, Humongous Entertainment, and Square moved from Seattle to Los Angeles, Soule quit Square to score Gilbert's children's adventure game series, Putt-Putt; he was the company's third employee.

Soule composed the soundtracks to several children's games over the next three years, including games in the Putt-Putt, Pajama Sam, and Freddi Fish series.

While working at Humongous, Soule met fellow employee and video game designer Chris Taylor, and signed on to compose the soundtrack to his major project, Total Annihilation.

Soule convinced Taylor that, given the large number of other real-time strategy games coming out at the same time as Total Annihilation with techno scores, that to separate themselves they needed to do a large orchestral score.

He went so far as to bet a year's worth of reduced pay that it would pay off; Gilbert felt that it did after the first sentence of the first review of the game he read was about the music.

Given the software limitations at the time, to make the sound work correctly required a full live orchestra, the first that Soule had ever worked with; the orchestral tracks in Evermore had been performed by Soule and his brother by themselves, two instruments at a time.

He became an employee of Square in 1994 after several years of private composition studies.

After finishing the soundtrack to Secret of Evermore in 1995, he left to join Humongous Entertainment, where he composed for several children's games as well as Total Annihilation, his first award-winning score.

The soundtrack earned Soule his first award, that of "Best Music" of 1997 from GameSpot in their year-end awards.

Soule spent the next two years composing music for the game's two expansion packs and for children's games.

In 2000, he left to form his own music production company, Soule Media, now called Artistry Entertainment.

In February 2000, Jeremy and his brother, Julian, formed Soule Media as an independent music production company; its name has since been changed to Artistry Entertainment.

Julian works as a sound engineer and composer for the company, and has assisted Jeremy in several projects throughout his career, both credited and uncredited.

The first large project that Jeremy Soule worked on through the company was 2000's Icewind Dale, which won the best music of the year award from both IGN and GameSpot.

Soule was in a major car accident in the mid 2000s, during which he had a momentary realisation that life is precious.

In interview, he described a vision of "Native American warriors" that he saw during the crash.

In 2001, Soule scored the first of five Harry Potter games that he would work on between then and 2005.

His first game, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, was nominated for an Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences award for Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition, while Chamber of Secrets and Prisoner of Azkaban won and were nominated, respectively, for a British Academy of Film & Television Arts award for Best Score in the Game Music Category.

The other games he composed for that year include Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance and Azurik: Rise of Perathia, which he later described as a bad game lifted up in the eyes of testers and reviewers by good music.

He was responsible for composing the soundtracks to three top-selling role-playing games in 2002, those of Dungeon Siege, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, and Neverwinter Nights; Morrowind earned him his second Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences award nomination.

In 2005, he founded DirectSong, a record label that published digital versions of his soundtracks as well as those of classical composers.

DirectSong was subject to a class action lawsuit in 2015 but remained active until 2019.

Soule's works have been played in several live concerts such as the Symphonic Game Music Concert in Germany and the international Play! A Video Game Symphony concert series.

While many of his works are orchestral, he considers himself someone who creates more than just one type of music.

Several of Soule's soundtracks were created with the help of his brother, Julian.