Composer Robert Duncan’s most unusual professional appointment last month was a trip to explore the musical potential of a submarine, in preparation for the upcoming Scott Speedman-starring The Last Resort, which will premiere on Global and CBS this fall.

That research included playing a percussion instrument inside the submarine’s torpedo bays and creating a library out of the continuous pattering sounds of minnows knocking into its hull.

For Duncan, it’s pretty much business as usual.

The L.A.-based Canadian composer, whose credits include Missing (for which he was recently nominated for an Emmy), Castle and The Unit, amongst a slew of TV series, has been working outside of sample libraries and prerecorded sounds to write his music for the past few years.

“I started off writing all my music with just using electronics. A long time ago, there was a gong in a music store that I bought, and I was quite surprised at what a difference it made when I just played the gong live, underneath a suspenseful cue. It seemed to add a whole organic life to the cue – and that was the very beginning of my unusual instrument collection,” says Duncan.

And that collection now includes hundreds of instruments, and, he continues “artifacts and pieces of junk,” collected from junkyards, eBay and Craigslist, ranging from a tuiduk (a Middle Eastern double-reeded flute) and an Egyptian oud to helicopter parts, a fire extinguisher, an air conditioning duct and a typewriter – and others that aren’t immediately identifiable.

“One thing looks kind of like a metal silk screen frame but it sounds like an orchestral tympany when you play it,” says Duncan.

The artifacts he’s collected live in his five-room, 1400-square foot North Hollywood studio – an old rock and roll studio – where he’s worked for the past six years.

Duncan says being creative with the objects removes recognition and association, so it’s more interesting for the listener and harder to pinpoint the source of the sound.

“If you hear a rhythm played on a triangle, one side of your brain might feel the tension or some kind of momentum. But then the other part of your brain will be thinking, ‘I’m thinking of a dude playing a triangle,'” he says. “With some instruments, like a snare drum, for example, when you hear [it], you think ‘army,’ you associate it with military marches, and it almost loses some of its potency. It’s generally not so with a fire extinguisher or a typewriter.”

That’s not to say that composing creatively is without its challenges. Duncan says that in working with directors who have pushed to try something different, he has been asked to use a spray paint can as a percussion instrument (it worked), and to sample a toilet flushing, a symbolism of a character’s life going down the can (not so much).

Duncan says that he approaches composing for a particular scene according to what it should achieve emotionally.

The best instruments to make people cry? Ones that sound very similar to the human voice. A fire extinguisher, he notes, is better used to induce anxiety.

As a Canadian based in L.A., Duncan says he arrived stateside – with the plan to work with an orchestra – well-equipped by his experience in Toronto. It’s an opinion that’s been echoed by other expat industry professionals who have said their Canadian work actually gave them an edge in the U.S.

“I find that everything that I learned in Toronto translated seamlessly into Los Angeles. I didn’t feel that I was at a disadvantage [because] of all the schooling, training and apprenticing in Canada,” he says.

Here’s a clip of Duncan’s underwater trip: