Examining Ethics returns this season with more than new episodes. The Prindle Institute’s podcast is debuting an original sound, the product of a campus collaboration that spans two schools and two generations of musicians.

The new theme, titled “Examination,” was composed by Bailey Rent and Tyler Wemhoff, both students at the DePauw University Institute of Music, and scored for an intimate chamber lineup of vibraphone, marimba, cello, piano and contrabass. The piece moves through several connected sections, easing and quickening in tempo as the cello shifts between plucked and bowed lines, giving the theme a sense of motion and return rather than a single fixed mood.

Woven into the score are natural soundscapes recorded at the DePauw Nature Park, compiled by composition professor Eliza Brown as part of their sonic ecology project, “The Listening Year.” Together, the mallet percussion, strings and field recordings capture, in sound, what the show has always tried to do in conversation: hold dialogue and honest inquiry together, and let them breathe.

Catch the new theme below, and tune in to new episodes of Examining Ethics, releasing biweekly this academic year.