Skyrim:Music

thumb|right|Cover art of the Skyrim soundtrack
Skyrim's music was composed by Jeremy Soule, who also composed the music for both Oblivion and Morrowind. A four-disc soundtrack release was available physically from DirectSong and it is digitally available from iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play. For the first time in the series additional music was created for add-ons for the game, though no official soundtrack of the music from Dawnguard and Dragonborn has been released. The complete soundtrack for Skyrim totals almost 4 hours in length.

Soundtracks
Skyrim
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Original Game Soundtrack could previously be purchased from DirectSong and is still available on iTunes. The physical release is split over 4 CDs. The fourth disc contains "Skyrim Atmospheres" which consists of various pieces of ambiance, sound effects, and music from the game, notably the   tracks.

Two extended pieces of music are missing from the original soundtrack release:   and  . Most of the shorter tracks have also been excluded.



Dawnguard
Dawnguard adds several more unnamed tracks as background music when exploring Castle Volkihar, the Soul Cairn, and the Forgotten Vale. The song  , an edited variant of Seven Thousand Steps, plays when firing a Bloodcursed Elven Arrow and causing a solar eclipse. None of these tracks have ever been officially released.



Dragonborn
Dragonborn adds several tracks for exploring Solstheim and Apocrypha, the latter of which are reused from Dawnguard's Volkihar ambience tracks. Most of the music for exploring Solstheim has been taken directly from Morrowind's soundtrack. The new music has never been officially released.



Skyrim Special Edition
The   added several tracks from the Oblivion soundtrack for use in various in various Creations. They were defined in   to make them available as a modding resource.  At first they were placed in  , but with the   update, which removed that file, they were moved to   along the rest of the soundtrack.



Development and reception
Awards
Skyrim's soundtrack was nominated by the British Academy of Film & Television Arts for Best Score in the Game Music Category, but was beaten by L.A. Noire. It was also nominated by Game Audio Network Guild for Music of the Year and Best Original Soundtrack Album, but again lost. The main theme, Dragonborn, won the Game Audio Network Guild's Best Original Vocal (Choral) award.

Recurring motifs
Although most of the music is new, a few motifs from Morrowind and Oblivion make a recurring appearance:

"Dragonborn" is the latest version of what Todd Howard has called the "Elder Scrolls Theme". It first appeared as "Call of Magic" (aka "Nerevar Rising") in Morrowind and then as "Reign of the Septims" in Oblivion. The latest version is the first to include lyrics, sung by a men's choir in the dragon tongue.  The original version and a translation appear in-game in the book Songs of Skyrim.
The track "The Jerall Mountains" originally appeared in Morrowind as "Rise to Reality" ("Silt Sunrise" in the Special Edition soundtrack) and in Oblivion as "Through the Valleys".
The piece "Wind Guide You" is a remake of "Minstrel's Lament", which also appeared in Oblivion.
"Unbroken Road" shares a motif with "Reign of the Septims," first recognizable at 0:26 in "Reign of the Septims" and 0:58 of "Unbroken Road."

Jeremy Soule's commentary
Composer Jeremy Soule has shared his inspirations and background information about some of the tracks on the soundtrack. Due to the length of his commentary, his remarks on each track have been hidden with collapsible show/hide tags.

:From Past to Present
 

:Ancient Stones: 
 

:The White River:
 

:Standing Stones: 
 

:Tundra:
 

:Solitude: 
 

:Sky Above, Voice Within:
 

:Wind Guide You: 
 

:Skyrim Atmospheres: 
 

:mus_explore_dlc_falmervalley_01:
 

Technical Information
Extracting in-game music
In previous games the music was available as MP3 files in the main game directory, but for Skyrim the files have been included in  , and encoded with a ".xwm" extension. Once extracted from the BSA, they can be played using MPC-HC (no playback issues), the VideoLAN media player, or Audacity  which are also able to convert them to other formats, such as MP3.

You can use the program BSAUnpack to extract files from .bsa archives.
You can use the program Skyrim Audio Converter to convert .xwm files to .mp3

The music can be converted to wav via xWMAEncode.exe found in the Microsoft DirectX Software Developer's Kit. The SDK is about 500MB compressed and requires installation, but the basic .exe is a standalone encoder/decoder, thus best found and used without the kit.

The Main Theme can be found in the "special" directory.

Special Edition Format differences
The music format differs between the different platform versions of Skyrim Special Edition.

PC and Xbox One use Microsoft xWMA format (.xwm) at 48kbps to store music. PS4 uses Sony Atrac format (.at9) at 144kbps to store music, and is considered to be much higher quality due to the higher bitrate.

Notes
The trailers for Dawnguard and Dragonborn each have a unique theme which is not present in the game itself or available as individual releases.
A distinctly different rendition of "One They Fear" can be heard multiple times in the Behind the Wall - The Making of Skyrim video.
The song "Unbound" is on the official soundtrack yet does not appear anywhere in the game nor is present within the game's files. It was possibly originally intended to be played during the quest Unbound when Alduin attacks Helgen.
The song "Nerevar Rising Reprise" was composed and recorded for Skyrim  , but ultimately released only on the Morrowind Special Edition Soundtrack.
The compression algorithms used by the game can cause parts of the soundtrack to drop out or be over-emphasized. For instance, the percussion section is far more audible in the in-game version of "Tooth and Claw" than in the soundtrack version. Compare the in-game version of "Tooth and Claw" to the soundtrack version.

See Also
Bardic Performances

References