These gurgles stop only at the moment we get our first filmic image: the moment we actually are in the ocean, we no longer hear the ocean.

As the opening credits start rolling, still against a black background, the theme coexists with the ambient underwater noise. The screen fades to black, and after a few more seconds we hear the famous theme. The film opens with the Universal Pictures logo, and the soundtrack consists of underwater sounds, distant waves, and echolocation blips - things we might actually hear while in the ocean. I don’t mean the iconic half-step motif, the alternating F/F sharp that has people scared of bodies of water to this day. To see how BRAAAM puts to bed the established sound of 1970s blockbusters, consider the first thing we hear as the lights go down for a screening of Jaws (1975). In its short history, however, film has also worked its magic to Wurlitzer organs and string quartets - and to silence. The lush, Late Romantic idiom it succeeds is just as much a historical artifact, but it was with us for so long that we have accepted it as the sound of the silver screen. Let’s be careful: BRAAAM is not a deviation from some traditional way movies have always been scored it is the end of one specific era in film scoring and the beginning of another. Six years after its release, Inception invites us to think about our relationship to film music and how it has transformed over the last generation - from a moment when the average blockbuster soundtrack sounded like Richard Wagner, to a moment when the average blockbuster soundtrack sounds like, well, BRAAAM. We are meant to register BRAAAM as new and different, but we aren’t well-equipped to say what, exactly, makes it different. In fact, film sound tends to be at its most effective when it hovers at the very edge of our awareness. Is BRAAAM something that happened to us, or is it something we, as moviegoers, desired?įilm doesn’t usually ask us to be as good at listening as at looking. Although it has its roots in a scoring style composer Hans Zimmer employed for much of the early ’00s, the BRAAAM heard in seemingly every trailer was first recorded for Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film Inception, and has been adapted, copied, and even outright sampled ever since. It may sound synthetic, but it’s usually produced with brass instruments and a prepared piano. (If you think you’ve successfully avoided it, here’s a sample). The internet and the sound’s creator refer to it as BRAAAM. It is the sound we know is coming when a trailer intercuts CGI objects slamming into each other with portentous fades-to-black. It is the noise that goes with people in spandex standing in a Delacroix-style tableau, or so Hollywood has decided. Variations on this sound sequence - a simple string motif interrupted by sudden bursts of non-melodic noise - are everywhere in film soundtracks and trailers.

As the light flickers over you, strings churn from the speakers, interrupted at certain intervals by a massive blast of indistinguishable brass, like an alphorn next to an amplifier.ĭoes this sound familiar? At some point movies started braying at us like ships lost in a fog, and we have come to accept that as perfectly normal. You find your seat to the first trailer, some confection involving superheroes or zombies. You walk into a local multiplex a few minutes after the lights have dimmed. Adrian Daub | Longreads | December 2016 | 15 minutes (3,902 words)

Inception fog horn sound effect