For Episode 19 of the UNSUNG podcast, @mixedbyjocelin and Mirek Stiles were joined by Composer, Pianist & Producer Raphaëlle Thibaut at Kensaltown East studios in New York.
Raphaëlle is a composer, pianist & producer recently nominated as a Breakthrough Composer of the Year by the International Film Music Critics Association in 2025.
Enrolled in piano lessons from age 4, she spent the first 15 years of her life studying music, adoring the work of composers such as Ennio Morricone, Jerry Goldsmith, and Francois de Roubaix. After graduating from the Music Conservatory of Lille, France, in 2002, she went on to land a marketing position with Google. She left this role in 2015 after a life-changing experience at Abbey Road Studios, quitting her job the next day to immediately pursue her lifelong passion for music and film scoring.
Raphaëlle’s first “I’ve Arrived” moment came in 2021 when she scored the Emmy Award-winning Disney+/National Geographic nature docuseries “Secrets of the Whales,” produced by James Cameron. Since then, she’s scored “Sea Lions of the Galapagos” (2025) for Disney+, co-composed “Heart of Invictus” (2023) for Netflix, “Timeless Heroes: Indiana Jones & Harrison Ford” (2023) for Disney+, “Introducing, Selma Blair,” 2021 for Discovery+ and “Mama’s Boy” (2022) for HBO, among many, many more.
In this episode, Raphaëlle discusses doing her first session at Abbey Road’s Studio 2, visiting Abbey Road for the first time, and making the decision to leave her corporate job at Google to pursue music full-time. She recounts how she met Mirek, her journey learning the ropes of production and composition, and her first “I’ve Arrived” moment in the industry. The conversation then delves into pitching herself as a composer, the distinctions between writing music for trailers versus film scores, and her transition from one to the other. Raphaëlle also covers composing for advertisements, music libraries, and short films, as well as the challenge of composers being pigeonholed into specific genres. She shares her process for starting musical ideas, how she challenges classical rules, and the importance of defining a unique sonic world. Further topics include writing music for television series, her favorite plugins, how she organizes her sounds, and her outlook for the next five years. The episode concludes with a look back at her childhood fascination with film music.
