Martin O’Donnell

Martin O'Donnell is an American composer, audio director and sound designer whose reputation rests almost entirely on one developer. At Bungie he handled music and sound across the Myth series, Oni, Halo and Destiny, writing the scores with Michael Salvatori, and he also directed the voice cast and the sound design for the Halo trilogy, which is a much larger job than composing alone.

That combined role is why the Halo games sound coherent rather than merely scored. Music, weapon audio, voice performance and silence were being managed by one person, so a firefight and a cutscene belong to the same world rather than two adjacent ones. The main Halo theme, chanted male voices over strings and percussion, did the thing game music rarely manages: it became the identity of the franchise instead of an accompaniment to it, and it survived two decades of reuse without wearing out.

Game composers are usually invisible outside their own audience. O'Donnell is one of the few whose work people who have never played the games can hum.