Martin O'Donnell: chant, strings and the sound of Halo

Selected works

• Myth: The Fallen Lords (with Michael Salvatori)1997
• Halo: Combat Evolved (with Michael Salvatori)2001
• Halo 2 (with Michael Salvatori)2004
• Halo 3 (with Michael Salvatori)2007
• Halo: Reach (with Michael Salvatori)2010
• Destiny (with others)2014

The sound in a sentence

Choral chant, strings and rock percussion combined in themes designed to be broken into sections and re-ordered during play.

Conservatory training and a jingle business with Michael Salvatori

O'Donnell was born in 1955. He studied at the Wheaton College Conservatory of Music, earning a bachelor's degree in music, and took a master's degree in composition at the University of Southern California.

With Michael Salvatori he co-founded TotalAudio, a company that wrote music for television and radio commercials before moving into game soundtracks. Their first major game work was Myth: The Fallen Lords (1997), a real-time tactics game from Bungie, then a small independent developer.

Bungie also hired them for Oni (2001). During contract negotiations for that game, O'Donnell joined Bungie's staff, only days before the studio was bought by Microsoft.

Writing for commercials trains a composer to make an immediate impression in a short time, which is useful in games where a theme might be heard for only a few seconds on a menu screen before the player starts playing.

Halo: Combat Evolved and a theme that opens with chant

Halo: Combat Evolved launched with the original Xbox in 2001. Its main theme opens with male voices singing a slow, chant-like line before strings and percussion take over. Those two ingredients, sacred-sounding choral writing and driving rock-influenced action music, became the series' musical identity.

O'Donnell and Salvatori went on to score Halo 2 (2004), Halo 3 (2007), Halo 3: ODST (2009) and Halo: Reach (2010). O'Donnell served as Bungie's audio director across its projects in that period, overseeing sound effects and voice as well as music.

The scores were written to be cut into sections that the game could start, loop or end depending on what was happening in combat. That approach is a form of horizontal re-sequencing, described on our adaptive music page. For the wider shift to orchestral and choral game scores in this period, see the orchestral turn.

Combat in a first-person game can last a few seconds or several minutes, and players can retreat, hide or rush forward. Writing in sections allowed the music to start when a fight began, continue for as long as it lasted and end in a satisfying way, rather than playing for a fixed length or stopping abruptly.

The Halo 2 soundtrack in the Billboard 200

The commercial release of the Halo 2 soundtrack became the best-selling video game soundtrack in the United States and was the first video game soundtrack to enter the Billboard 200 album chart. In the UK, music from the Halo series reached number 244 in the Classic FM Hall of Fame in 2015.

Those results showed that game soundtracks could sell as albums in their own right, a point that also comes up on our concert hall era page.

Halo was a launch title for Microsoft's first console, and its music became strongly linked with the Xbox brand in the years that followed. Live performances of Halo music have since appeared in game-music concert programmes in the UK and elsewhere.

Destiny, Music of the Spheres and Highwire Games

O'Donnell co-composed Destiny (2014) with Salvatori and others. Linked to it was Music of the Spheres, a large orchestral suite written during the game's development. His employment at Bungie ended in April 2014.

In 2015 he co-founded Highwire Games, whose virtual reality game Golem was released in November 2019 with his music. For the long-running series he helped define, Halo Infinite (2021) was later scored by Gareth Coker, Joel Corelitz and Curtis Schweitzer; see our Gareth Coker profile.

Michael Salvatori, his co-composer throughout the Halo years, continued to work on Destiny's music at Bungie after 2014. Their partnership, which began in advertising, is one of the longest-running composing collaborations in game music.

Golem is played with motion controllers on a VR headset, a format that raises its own questions about where music should sit in a fully surrounding sound space, and how it should respond as players turn their heads.