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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.