"One true north, I'm living it/take the pulse, I'm feeling it/heroes call, I'm singing it/play your part, I'm playing it.”

So starts the theme song for the 2012 Arctic Winter Games, written and composed by brothers Daniel and Galen Ashley, who own the Whitehorse-based music production company Root Sellers Media, and collaborator Chris Ermatinger.

The song was first performed at the year out launch show held Thursday afternoon at the Canada Games Centre.

Following the performance – which included Nautasha Morehose, Daniel Ashley, Jamie Brown and Sarah Thibold drumming on upside down water coolers – Daniel handed a black box to a representative of Alaska's AWG team.

The package contains a small camera that's also an audio recorder. The first part of the song was recorded in Whitehorse and is now making its way through Alaska.

"Over the next eight months it's going to make its way to all the participating regions of the Arctic Winter Games, each region is going to have a chance to shoot some video and audio that's representative of their diverse culture or area, and then we're going to take all of the stuff that we get back and remix it and edit it into one big theme song for the opening ceremonies,” Ashley explained.

"It's never been done before,” he added. "We wanted some kind of unifying experience that we could use to build hype and excitement about the Games. But we wanted it to be something really engaging for young people and so we felt a really good way to do that would be through music and through video, because it's a very youthful art form, and it also gives people an opportunity to express themselves and the unique culture that they come from.”

For the first time in the AWG's history, a theme song will be relayed between the nine participating regions, rather than passing a torch or flame.

The theme song is making its way through Porter Creek Secondary, F.H. Collins Secondary and Vanier Catholic secondary schools today.

"We feel honoured as composers to be able to represent our northern roots and really engage youth with a project that's really innovative but also has the potential to

be a magical experience for people at the Games,” Daniel said.

The Ashley brothers have quite a resume, having composed music for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing and the 2010 Paralympic Games in Vancouver.

"Music is very universal, so no matter where you are in the world or what your cultural or historical background is, everybody's got some form of music,” Daniel said.

"It might not be all the same style, but everybody has those rudimentary elements of tone and rhythm, so it's a really powerful medium to bring people together and collaborate, and often the first place you have a really meaningful exchange between cultures is in a creative process, through music and through video.”