Jeremy Soule (/soʊl/ SOHL; 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, Total Annihilation, and the Harry Potter series.

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.

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

[2][3][4] 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.

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

[5] 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.

[9] 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.

[2] 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.

[11] 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.

[7][3] 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.

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 highway patrolman who arrived at the scene also invited him to meet a chief of the nearby Lummi Nation reservation who composed music.

[2] In 2005, Jeremy and Julian Soule founded DirectSong, a company which sold DRM-free downloads of compositions as well as works by dozens of classical composers.

The Skyrim soundtrack in particular is among Soule's most critically acclaimed pieces of work, receiving a BAFTA nomination as well as numerous other awards from organizations such as the Game Audio Network Guild.

In 2014, Soule also signed an MMO exclusivity deal with Sony Online Entertainment, to compose music for EverQuest Next and Landmark.

The soundtrack was available as part of the Compendium, a pack of digitally-distributed content that funded the prize pool for The International 2015 tournament, which took place in August 2015 and ultimately featured the largest prize-pool in e-sports history at the time, with over $18,000,000 in total.

[38] Legendary Pictures co-founder Scott Mednick was an early investor in Virtual Sonics, but withdrew in August 2019 via a stock buyout.

[56] The first live orchestral concert dedicated to Soule's music for "Skyrim" took place on November 16, 2016 at London's Palladium theater.

[6] Although many of his works are orchestral in nature, Soule has denied that it is his "style", as he feels that the term boxes him into only creating one type of music.

[17] Soule's greatest musical influences are "Debussy's exploration of harmony", "Wagner's grand operas", and "Mozart's form and composition".

[7] Among video game music influences, he has cited Square for providing him "with the education for what quality means to this business" and Nobuo Uematsu in particular.