Barn
A composer of recurring melodic identities
that amplify on-screen entertainment of all
genres. Games. Movies. Interactive.
Never wallpaper. Human hooks.
Barn (Andrew Barnabas) is a BAFTA-nominated British Guyanese composer for screen. In a career spanning 35 years, he has broken new ground at every turn — writing Sony's first orchestral video game score ever recorded with a full symphony orchestra, releasing the first game soundtrack on the prestigious Silva Screen label, and going on to score for Netflix, Channel 4, BBC One and Bethesda.
His score for Hating Peter Tatchell (Netflix) won the coveted Crystal Pine at the International Sound and Music Festival for Best Documentary Score. His most recent large-scale work, for Harvey Greenfield is Running Late, earned an RTS nomination. His music for the MediEvil PlayStation series has been described as "like something out of a Tim Burton movie."
Barn's work spans the full spectrum: symphonic orchestral scores recorded with live ensembles, through to synth-driven electronic and hybrid work. He is equally at home writing a choral lament, a funk cue, or a driving electronic score — sometimes within the same project.
Recent
Recent projects include synth-soaked 80s love letter Synthesized for Paragon Pictures (starring Thomas Turgoose, featuring songs from OMD, Kim Wilde and introducing Look Mum No Computer, the UK's Eurovision 2026 entrant), Unlicensed (award-winning debut feature by Mark Hampton), F1 Manager 2024 (Frontier, for Xbox, PlayStation and PC), Dead Pixels (E4, with Will Merrick and Rose Matafeo), Friday Night Live (BAFTA-winning comedy for Channel 4 with Ben Elton and Harry Enfield) and The Hatton Garden Job (Signature Pictures, with Matthew Goode, Larry Lamb and Joely Richardson).
His score for Netflix's Hating Peter Tatchell — co-written with collaborator Paul Arnold — won the Crystal Pine at the International Sound and Music Festival for Best Documentary Score. His music for Green Street 3 won Best Action Score.
Barn's score for Harvey Greenfield is Running Late was nominated for a Royal Television Society award. This inventive score saw him record percussion, marimba, acoustic bass, string quartet and choir at Queens' College Chapel, Cambridge.
Beginnings
Classically trained from an early age on piano, guitar and oboe, Barn studied at Trinity School of Music, and earned a degree in Popular Music Studies from Bretton Hall – the first course of its kind in the country. Also a passionate gamer with a fascination for the possibilities within the new medium, he had, in fact, already found a way to put his skills to work in the industry by the time he started his undergraduate studies.
He was just seventeen when he landed his first commission for the shoot ‘em up, SWIV. Released on the Amiga, Atari ST and the Commodore 64 by Sales Curve in 1991 to great acclaim, it placed Barn centre stage of a new creative boom in the rapidly changing games industry. It also demonstrated Barn’s unique talent for combining old and new, allowing him to bring a solid foundation of traditional musical skills to bear on new media and technologies. This would become a running theme in his career, establishing him as one of the great innovators in his field.
Other early games highlights included Aladdin in 1994 (which involved converting the orchestral score Alan Menken faxed over from Disney!), Creatures in 1996, Frogger in 1997 and MediEvil in 1998 – during which time he also became the head of Sony’s music department. MediEvil was to become a regular gig, with Barn composing for all four titles, evolving the score from fully electronic to fully orchestral as the technology grew.
Breaking new ground
One of the breakthrough scores of this period was his BAFTA nominated score for the 2003 game Primal, written with Paul Arnold (under the name Bob & Barn, a company the pair formed in 2001). This was to be the first games score to be recorded with City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra and chorus, and Sony's first official original game soundtrack (published by renowned film music label Silva Screen Records). Other major game credits included Neverwinter Nights, Lego Bionicle, Sega Rally, Brink, Forza, and PlayStation VR launch title RIGS – but the grand, cinematic scope of the scores for both Primal and the MediEvil series was immediately evident to all who heard them (Screen Rant magazine described the latter as ‘like something out of a Tim Burton movie’) and the expansion into film and TV was inevitable.
Since taking that step, Barn has also been commissioned to compose scores for the 2021 rom-com Me, Myself and Di and for Sacha Bennett’s 2024 adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (starring Robert Lindsay, Juliet Aubrey, Florence Kasumba, Tamzin Merchant, Tyger Drew-Honey and Lee Boardman). Traditional as Shakespeare is, it provided yet another opportunity for Barn to push his personal envelope, writing for a range of ethnic instruments he had never written for before, in addition to traditional string and orchestral arrangements. He’s written a case study about the film score here:
Barn lives in the heart of Cambridge with his wife and daughter.