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
The second of two 2015 Oscar-nominated soundtracks by French film composer Alexandre Desplat had an unusual task: “It’s difficult to show on screen what’s happening in the brain,” Desplat says of the film’s subject, WWII code-breaker Alan Turing. “I never thought the orchestra should be big; we should focus on him. The sensation that this brain is different, faster, complex. I felt that using computerized pitches and scales could render that. Then I mixed sometimes three or four tracks of pianos. Some are literal; some are random arpeggios that the computer plays.”