Happy New Year! We’re back after a holiday break spent… well, mostly in the studio. (Occupational hazard.)

This week’s selection comes from an interactive title that was halfway between a game and linear story, The Penguin Who Wouldn’t Swim. The cue itself is what game composers call “sad ending music”.

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Some film music cues are melodic and hummable, others more atmospheric. When writing an ambient cue, such as this disquieting accompaniment from the film Healers, I like to add and remove quiet instrumental layers so as to create a sense of ongoing motion. This piece features thrumming muted strings, twin bassoons, and the low register of the harp, which I’ve always regarded as an under-utilized timbre.

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This week’s music includes a happy accident, sonically speaking. While scoring a suspense film called Healers, I found an old mandolin sample whose file had become corrupted, resulting in a ghostly, distorted sound. I decided that it was perfect for this cue, and included it as a rhythm element. You can hear it around the one minute mark.

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This cue’s title refers to blindfolds, which put blind and sight-limited fencers on the same playing field. The uncanny ability of these fencers to compete using auditory and tactile cues is a central topic of the documentary Touché: A Blind Fencer’s Story.

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Some of the fencers in Touché: A Blind Fencer’s Story had their own themes, reflecting their personalities as captured in the documentary. Robbie’s leitmotif was a bluesy riff on acoustic guitars, performed here by Tom Strahle.

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