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Delhi Crime Season 3, starring Shefali Shah, Huma Qureshi, and Rasika Dugal, is now streaming on Netflix. For this season, composer Ceiri Torjussen pushed deep into new sonic territory, blending synths, Indian instrumentation, and human-driven textures to create a score that feels tense, intimate, and rooted in place. In this conversation with VENTS, he breaks down how the sound of the season took shape.
Interview with Ceiri Torjussen
VENTS: What was the first idea or sound that unlocked the musical tone for Delhi Crime season 3?
Ceiri Torjussen: Tanuj was excited for me to experiment with new ways of scoring, which was a real treat. Early on I created some custom-designed sounds for some of the characters. The villains theme for example has its own custom-designed synth sound with this creepy slow bend to it. I extended that idea as a general sound of dread by making it a very long, slow downward glissando over several octaves. You will hear that motif in many cues throughout the season.
VENTS: How did the emotional core of this season shape your choices in instrumentation and sound design?
Ceiri Torjussen: It was a challenge to score the plight of the young girls who were being abducted and trafficked in an emotional way without veering into melodrama. That was always a balance that I and Tanuj had to be aware of. Their sound needed to be 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; softer, slower, and breathier. Strings and gentler melodic instruments like piano and harp were used to score the captured girls, and their sound was the polar opposite to the music I wrote for the villains.
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, santoor, bansuri, and vocals.
The latter two were recorded for me by the fantastic artist Sheela Bringi. She recorded a few songs that I wrote as wild-track. I was then able to use her performances as the basis of certain cues and also use isolated elements and manipulate them in novel ways. These sounds gave a much more human approach to my score.
Sound, Tension, and Space
VENTS: You have scored everything from thrillers to large-scale action films. What parts of that background proved most useful for the grounded tension in Delhi Crime?
Ceiri Torjussen: All of it! As a percentage, Delhi Crime has more pulsing tension-type music than full-on bombastic action sequences. However, it does have its fair share of high-octane police chases and gunfighting so I had plenty of opportunity to write more action-oriented music as well. I have also scored a lot of horror films and true-crime documentaries, so writing dark, pulsing music and creepy ambient cues is very much in my wheelhouse.
VENTS: Were there moments this season where you had to pull back and let silence carry the weight? How did you decide where music should speak and where it should stay quiet?
Ceiri Torjussen: There are some moments of silence though these are fairly rare. These spots prove to be a welcome respite from all the musical tension, and a respite for me in the studio as well. But the nature of the editing and the filmmakers’ preferences meant that I had to write almost wall-to-wall music in season 3.
VENTS: The show deals with real-world issues. How do you balance dramatic scoring with respect for the true stories behind the series?
Ceiri Torjussen: The key was not to overdo the musical drama and not to let it veer into melodrama. The issues in the show are very serious and tragic, and these crimes are happening in our world today. The way Delhi Crime is shot makes it feel very real, almost verité documentary-style, so scoring it in an over-wrought, heart-on-your-sleeve style would have been in bad taste. It was important not to get schmalzy or over the top, especially during the very emotional sequences.
Place, Scale, and Character
VENTS: What challenges did the cultural and geographic setting of Delhi present when building the sonic world of the show?
Ceiri Torjussen: Since the story takes place in and around north and central India, I thought it prudent to restrict my Indian instrumental palette to this macro-region. Though not specifically Delhian, I focused on traditional north Indian instruments, ragas, and talas, as opposed to south Indian structures, which are completely different, though I did cheat with some great sounding south Indian drums.
New Delhi is a very cosmopolitan city, a true melting pot, so this is reflected in my music. And the synth-based backbone to my score established our home with the Delhi police.
VENTS: Looking back at projects like Blade II or Terminator 3, you worked in big, stylized soundscapes. How does your process shift when scoring something more intimate and character driven?
Ceiri Torjussen: It is a different mode of working and a completely different style of music. Those big studio films used large orchestras, huge percussion sections, often combined with synths. The orchestra was usually the primary texture. In Delhi Crime, the opposite is true. My synth bed is the primary texture, the default sound many cues start with.
Strings, piano, harp, or other western or Indian instruments are used, but orchestral sounds were sparse, intimate, and smaller-scale. A good use of strings can make a scene feel cinematic, but so can a processed bansuri put through cavernous reverbs with a ground-shaking synth bass. There are many ways now to make a scene feel big without defaulting to an orchestra. Aside from the budget, a traditional orchestral sound was never the aesthetic of this show.
VENTS: Was there a theme or motif from earlier seasons that you chose to evolve rather than rebuild from scratch?
Ceiri Torjussen: Yes. 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. I can play it up-tempo with a groove, or more atmospherically and reflectively for times when the police are pondering the case.
Surprises and Creative Breakthroughs
VENTS: Can you walk through a scene in season 3 where the music changed the storytelling in a way you did not expect at first?
Ceiri Torjussen: Yes. Without giving plot away, there is a tense scene in a village where the police are interviewing a family. Somehow the music took a quirky, odd turn. While it seemed far from most of my other Delhi Crime score, it worked for the scene so I went with it. It was percussive, with unusual meters and strange sounds like manipulated sarod and kitchen pots and pans. It turned a tense, routine police interview scene into something stranger and more sinister. It surprised both me and Tanuj.
VENTS: After decades of projects across genres, what new lesson or creative breakthrough came from scoring Delhi Crime?
Ceiri Torjussen: It was a good exercise in combining synth textures with traditional Indian sounds and making them blend in interesting ways. I liked the challenge of making a synth sound like an acoustic instrument, sometimes one that bends the note like a sitar or sarod. At the same time, I enjoyed turning Indian classical instruments or the human voice into a textural soundscape that could support an entire scene. It gave a north Indian flavor without sounding overtly localized or classical. I love blurring the lines like that for dramatic effect.
