Chris Miller
Delhi Crime Season 3 plunges into some of the series’ darkest emotional terrain yet, and composer Ceiri Torjussen faced the challenge of building a musical landscape that supported that intensity, while keeping the tone grounded. In case you aren’t familiar with the show, Delhi Crime follows a police force as they investigate high-profile crimes in Delhi and is inspired by both real and fictional events. Having scored Season 2 of the show, Ceiri had already established a sonic palette that had worked, so for Season 3 he added on more traditional Indian sounds than the previous, but processed them in unusual ways. When discussing his thought process behind the score Ceiri says, “Since the story takes place in/around north and central India, I thought it prudent to restrict my Indian instrumental palette to this macro-region. Though not specifically “Delhian,” I did focus on mostly traditional north Indian instruments, ragas and talas, as opposed to south Indian structures.”
In the below interview Ceiri discusses everything from how he balanced sorrow with suspense to how he carved out distinct musical identities for the victims, villains, and Vartika’s steadfast police.
Listen to some of Ceiri’s music for Season 3 here.
Season 3 deals with trauma in a very grounded, unflinching way. As a composer, how do you translate that emotional reality without overwhelming the viewer?
It was definitely a challenge to score the plight of the young girls who were being abducted and trafficked in an emotional way but without veering into melodrama. That was always a balance that I and Tanuj (the director) had to be aware of. Their sound needed to be at the same time sad (tragic even), but also unsettling, scary, and creepy at times. We follow their storyline through every episode, so I needed to reflect both their sorrow and their struggle for survival. Their sound was more acoustic and less synthetic. It was often softer, slower and breathier (using bansuri—an Indian flute—and sometimes the female voice). Strings and gentler melodic instruments (e.g piano and harp) were also used to score the captured girls, and their sound was the polar opposite to the music I wrote for the villains in the story.
The show’s villains are chillingly composed and methodical. What emotions or psychological layers did you want their musical motif to reveal that the camera doesn’t?
I don’t think music is really capable of expressing specific emotions or psychological layers, whatever the medium. How does music convey say “menace” vs “terror,” or “spite” vs “envy”? Surely everyone’s interpretation of what these emotions “sound like” would be different. The goal with my score was more to enhance the villains’ generally dangerous, scary and creepy demeanor. That said, I did enjoy using some musical leitmotifs in a subliminal way to refer to certain story points. For instance, character A’s theme could be played under a scene featuring only characters B and C, if B and C were talking about character A. In that sense, there are clues in the music which hint at story.
Vartika’s character is the moral anchor of the series. How did your musical approach shift when scoring moments centered on her leadership or vulnerability?
There’s a “cops getting to work” theme which I also consider to be Vartika’s theme. This crops up in all kinds of scenarios when Vartika and the Delhi police are on screen, and the nature of the theme means that I can play it up-tempo, with a groove, or more atmospherically and reflectively, for times when Vartika and her colleagues are pondering the case. There’s also a “B – backstory” for Vartika in this season, which (without wanting to give away spoilers), reveals one of Vartika’s past cases. For this section I did use a different palette—one closer to the abducted girls’ sound, for which I featured some female vocals.
Were there particular characters this season who surprised you musically—someone whose theme evolved in a way you didn’t initially expect?
Again, without wanting to give any plot away, there’s a tense scene in a village in which the police are interviewing a family. Somehow the music took a very quirky, odd turn. While this seemed like quite a far cry from most of my other Delhi Crime score, it seemed to really work for the scene so I went with it. It was percussive, with unusual meters and featuring strange sounds (some manipulated Indian sarod, kitchen pots and pans, etc.).
Across three seasons, Delhi Crime has cultivated a very specific tonal universe. How do you maintain that continuity while still pushing the sound in new directions?
This is my second outing with Delhi Crime (since I also scored Season 2 in 2022), so I’d already established a sonic palette that had worked for the show. Also, Andrew Lockington’s excellent music for Season 1 first established a synth-based sound-world for the show, so I like to think that there’s a sonic consistency through all three seasons. All that said, Season 3 came with a unique challenge: it’s a human drama about sex trafficking and so, while I needed to keep the gritty, synth-based sound-world alive, I also needed to address the tragic human consequences of the harrowing storyline. This meant sometimes leaning into the more emotional story beats and trying to reflect the plight of the young girls in the show in a dramatic but sensitive way. It was a hard balance to strike.
For this season I decided to use more traditional Indian sounds than in Season 2, but processed in unusual ways. I focused on instruments like sarod (a type of Indian lute), santoor (Indian hammer dulcimer), bansuri (Indian bamboo flute) and vocals. The latter two elements were recorded for me by the fantastic artist Sheela Bringi. She recorded a few ‘songs’ that I wrote as ‘wild-track’ (i.e. not to picture). I was then able to use her performances not only as the basis of certain cues but also use isolated elements of the recordings and manipulate/process them in novel ways. These sounds gave a much more ‘human’ approach to my score which was especially useful for the sound-world of the young girls’ storylines.
Delhi is more than a backdrop—it’s almost a character. How did the city’s cultural density influence your decisions about instrumentation and musical structure?
Since the story takes place in/around north and central India, I thought it prudent to restrict my Indian instrumental palette to this macro-region. Though not specifically “Delhian,” I did focus on mostly traditional north Indian instruments, ragas and talas, as opposed to south Indian structures, which are completely different (though I did cheat on occasion with some great sounding south Indian drums).
All that said, New Delhi is a very cosmopolitan city—a true melting pot of religions, languages and cultures—so this is reflected in my music also. And, of course, the synth-based backbone to my score established our ‘home’ with the Delhi police.
You incorporated North Indian instruments in processed, textural ways. How do you balance authenticity with the need to reinterpret those sounds through your own artistic lens?
“Authenticity” is a complicated word when talking about film/TV music. The music I write isn’t diegetic (i.e. it’s not ‘on screen’), but rather serves as emotional and kinetic underscore. Luckily for us composers we’re rarely constrained by needing to be “authentic” to any specific place or tradition, regardless of a film or show’s location or subject matter. I chose to use some north Indian sounds (with different degrees of ‘processing’, and sometimes no processing at all), but the overwhelming sound-world is more synths and strings. The Indian sounds are a color, just like any other sound I used in the score. They’re obviously chosen because of the general location, but also due to their excellent musical and emotional potential.
What do you hope the audience feels—consciously or subconsciously—when they listen to the score in the context of these difficult narratives?
I hope that they’re as moved by the story as I was when I was composing to it. So long as the score helps tell the story, and helps to enhance emotions shown on screen and the subliminal psychology of the characters, I think the score has done its job.
If you had to describe the musical identity of Delhi Crime Season 3 in three words—distinct from the earlier seasons—what would they be and why?
“Unnervingly creepy”—because this season’s storyline doesn’t get much creepier than this story. I hope the music conveys this whenever we encounter the evil villains!
“Sorrowful”—the music is accompanying some harrowing storylines, so I hope it succeeds by supporting the plight of the victims in the story.
