Watch the videos below to hear three new songs from BioShock Infinite! see deal BioShock: Infinite - PlayStation 3 $4.99on Gamestop

(Note that videos may contain mild spoilers from the first hour of the game)

While BioShock is a franchise known for its storytelling, much of what it accomplishes wouldn’t be possible without a great score underneath. Back in December, Irrational revealed that BioShock 1 and 2 composer Garry Schyman is returning for Infinite , with creative director Ken Levine noting at the time that fans can expect a “different, sparer style” compared to previous BioShock games.During a visit to Irrational last month, IGN was able to sit down with Levine to discuss the game’s music, as well as ask a few questions of Schyman in a separate interview. Both men have a lot to say about what you can expect from Infinite, plus have allowed us to reveal three of the songs from the game.

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Wait, isn’t that by The Beach Boys?

“ I tried a lot of different experiments with the score, as I did with the original BioShock, and we found that simpler was usually better.

“When you talk about music being [sparer], what I was referring to was not the frequency of music, but the instrumentation and the style,” Levine told IGN. “To me, this game has much more of an American feel to it. We wanted a bit more of a frontier feel to it, slightly. It would be very easy to go in a bad direction with that. It could be very Civil War-y or very Wild West-y. The Bonanza theme. That kind of thing. It’s not what I wanted. I think probably the biggest inspiration for me was Johnny Greenwood’s score for There Will Be Blood. He’s one of the musicians in Radiohead. He did this wonderful, incredibly spare score. That was a good starting point. There’s some influence from the score for 12 Monkeys in Garry’s score. And then there’s just Garry.”“As I wrote the score I did not limit myself to the music of the period,” he continued. “That would not have worked at all. If I had I would have been limited to the style of classical music in the late 19th or early 20th century or the popular music of that time. That would have been so restrictive that it would not have permitted me to create a useful score for the game. Certainly, the time period and musical styles of the time were very influential as I composed. But it was more like letting those influences filter through me and as I saw the game and its musical needs.”

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Hear BioShock Infinite’s Elizabeth theme.

“ Though the score for Infinite is uniquely different in most respects, the original BioShock score was always hovering around me.

“There are some composers who were ahead of their time working in the period,” Levine added. “Certainly popular music of the period was fairly on the nose. Very major-key. All the introducing blues scales and stuff hadn’t been introduced into the mainstream of music yet. What we think of as modern music, with the interesting tonal changes that you see in blues and things like that, comes from traditional African music slave music to blues and jazz and rock ‘n’ roll. Songs of the period had this degrading kind of sequence, and then you see things like Scott Joplin and ragtime coming along, where there’s syncopation and much more interesting coloration to the chords and the progressions in the songs. We had to be very careful, because there was a lot of not so great music at the time.”“Like the original BioShock there is not wall-to-wall music in Infinite,” Schyman continued. “Frankly I do not like wall-to-wall music in video games or films, so I was grateful they kept a similar approach in that respect. The music in Infinite is triggered by specific events and does its job seamlessly with the visuals. Though the score for Infinite is uniquely different in most respects, the original BioShock score was always hovering around me as I wrote for Infinite. Sometimes just making sure that what I wrote did not sound like the original BioShock. At other times I was influenced by its artistic approach which is present in the new score. This is no ordinary game and because it is so interesting and deep it permitted me to compose really interesting music.”

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Hear an excerpt from BioShock Infinite’s “AD.”

“Garry’s a smart guy,” Levine concluded. “He spends a lot of time thinking about what’s going on. He has some beautiful themes here. He works great with dissonance. I think we tend to enjoy music that isn’t typical. There’s a lot of minor keys and a lot of dissonance that we incorporate into the piece. Or when we’re using period music, we quite often use a counterpoint where the music will be very upbeat, but the scene around you will be very threatening.”BioShock Infinite will hit Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC on March 26th, with the soundtrack available in both of its Collector's Editions . Keep checking back to IGN for much more content every day leading up to the release.

Post your favorite game soundtrack in the comments below, or tweet your favorite game soundtrack at @IGN with the hashtag #soundtrack. Tomorrow we’ll pick a winner at random to win a BioShock Infinite prize pack, which includes an action figure, a rare physical copy of BioShock Infinite: Mind in Revolt , an Irrational notepad, stickers, t-shirt and a canvas bag.

Andrew Goldfarb is IGN’s news editor. Keep up with pictures of the latest food he’s been eating by following @garfep on Twitter or garfep on IGN.