“BRAAAM”: The Sound That Invaded the Hollywood Soundtrack | Hacker News Reader

“BRAAAM”: The Sound That Invaded the Hollywood Soundtrack

blog.longreads.com

134 pointsDiabloD398 comments

This article is fantastic, and really brings together the thoughts I've heard expressed about this in a way that is mostly accessible. I think it's a bit dramatic though. It seems like people in every era look back and say "Why don't we create things with the same care things were created with in the past?" The existence of the question implies that what is being made now is somehow worse than what has been made in the past.

While it's possible this is true, I think it's more likely that this is just survivor bias at work. Nobody remembers the terrible summer blockbusters from years past. This years robots destroying cities were the Westerns and Noir of years past. Everybody remembers Casablanca, and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and these titanic movies overshadow the Noir and the Westerns that they were deconstructing. At some point somebody is going to make The Searchers of robots beating everyone up, and another genre will step in to the role of mass-market crap.

I think the actual argument in the case of the "BRAAM"[1] sound is that Inception is a genre defining movie, on the level of Jaws or Il Brutti. It's become a shorthand for Earth-shattering collisions, in the same way Sergio Leone's soundtracks are synonymous with the west, and the Jaws theme is synonymous with being stalked. You already hear people imitating it to give additional context to stories.

[1] Sidenote, because it bothers me: The sound seems much closer to "BWAAAAA" than "BRAAAAM". This is not important, but it bothers me.

I completely agree with that sidenote, in particular where did that "M" come from?!

I suspect it has something to do with the author's accent. My ex-roommate was a brit with a semi-received pronunciation who majored in linguistics, and we had a lot of conversations about what words sounded like to each other. It's weird how often we were just completely unable to understand each other.

In this case, I bet the R is the clue. The author probably has some sort of non-rhotic accent where the vowels sound much more rounded. The R would give a bit of the brassy trill sound, and they would probably add the M to color the sound of the vowel so that the word has that bassy ending. I'm guessing that if they tried reading BWAAAA it would sound too rounded and lyrical, and BRAAA would start to capture the early timbre of the sound, but would still probably end of a higher, less aggressive note.

I can't really imagine exactly what accent causes his BRAAM to sound like our BWAAA, but you can kind of imagine what I'm talking about by imitating a guy from Boston saying BWAAA vs. BRAAAM.

Edit: It appears the author went to Swarthmore. My brother went there, and the general consensus is that it should be pronounced non-rhotically. To my ears, the way they say the first phoneme sounds like "SwaAH"[1] (like a person who is surprised, but also non-plussed), whereas I would say it like "SwaRRR", in kind of a gutteral/piraty way. So I wouldn't be surprised if he thought BRAAM approached the gutteral/brassy sound of the effect much better than BWAAA.

[1] I don't know IPA. If any linguists are reading this, I'm sorry. Please feel free to correct anything I've said.

They wanted the hardness of "R" over "W" and didn't want to seem like they were screaming about brasserie?

Lol. You probably mean brassière, not brasserie (which means "brewery")

Most of these sounds cut off quickly to increase the effect. The "M" forces you to close your mouth cutting off the sound in a similar manner.

The "R" is presumably because these sound also tend to have a rolling sound to them (reverb?). Think brrr or purr.

You could probably say something like PREEEB with similar effect though.

Interestingly enough I can literally hear it say "BRAAAAMmmm"

The ending has a harsher tone to it compared to the bassy open sound at the beginning. I think it's an artifact from the reverb maybe. I know analyzing it in text is difficult but I hear it like the beginning is BRAH. then the fade out it AAMMMMMmmm.

...just survivor bias at work. Nobody remembers the terrible summer blockbusters from years past.

But people remember Jaws, Terminator, and Aliens.

At some point somebody is going to make The Searchers of robots beating everyone up

It's about time we got something like that: https://xkcd.com/311/

There was that 1st person movie, which actually was kinda cool, but it made me nauseous.

Weird that this article gives no credit to Brad Fiedel's work on The Terminator. That's the first time I can recall hearing BRAAAM, over 10 years before any of the other movies he talks about used it.

As far as the origin of the sound itself, seems pretty obvious that people are just oversampling a Klaxon.

> seems pretty obvious that people are just oversampling a Klaxon.

Klaxons were designed to make a very specific impression, so even if they aren't oversampling a Klaxon, I am not surprised if they are subconsciously arriving at the same result. But I'm pretty sure you are on to something -- I recall a monster sound being specifically based on a klaxon. I believe it was either the War of the Worlds tripod, or the Cloverfield monster.

Half Life 2 (2004) uses it some for various alien ships. (new War of the Worlds: 2005, Cloverfield: 2008)

That may be what I'm remembering it from. I've played HL2 with the commentary on, and it would be pretty easy to get HL2 confused with new War of the Worlds.

>I've played HL2 with the commentary on

http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Developer_commentary

Never knew about this until reading your comment.

Anyone tallied how much of John Wick is talking vs action? 76 kills in 101 minutes.

If you watched Tony Zhou's recent "Every Frame a Painting" episode about why the Marvel movies all have such unmemorable soundtracks (where he blames temp scores), you should also watch the response by Dan Golding where he claims Zhou has misidentified the real culprit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcXsH88XlKM

Carefully avoiding saying whether it's good or bad, Golding (like this article) says Hans Zimmer is almost solely responsible for why films and trailers sound the way they do right now. Whether or not you like it, and see Zimmer as a musical villain or not, it's kind of interesting that we're living in the middle of a one-man revolution in a particular artistic field.

Dan Golding's response seems pretty on-the-nose to me. Although I think he's right to cite Zimmer as someone who pioneered a certain method and style that has become prevalent in a big chunk of movie genres, I think the real culprit here (if you want to lay the blame somewhere) is just the economics of the Hollywood filmmaking system, which prizes cost-control, speed, and consistency of product above all else.

It's sad to see the composer Patrick Doyle get cited in both of those video essays for his music for Thor (which I agree, is generic and boring) because it illustrates the extent to which really talented film composers can get absorbed into this system. His scores for Henry V [1], Dead Again, and Carlito's Way all stand out as really shining example of 90s-era film scoring.

[1] Great example of his work here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-yZNMWFqvM

Zimmer is often accused of scoring more movies than he actually does, because other composers are told to simply copy him. Whether you're actually paying for the real deal or not, your movie is going to end up with the same sound.

As this article points out, Zimmer "scores more movies than he actually does" because he's built a kind of film score workshop where dozens of collaborators turn out scores in his style by the bushel.

I first discovered this when Pandora spun up a rousing number from Klaus Badelt's Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack and I swore I was listening to Gladiator. Badelt is a longtime Zimmer collaborator.

It's interesting that Zimmer himself took credit for composing the music for the Pirates sequels once the franchise was an (unexpected) smash.

Pirates has a really memorable soundtrack though.

People like to moan about Zimmer (and I do loathe his scores with a passion) but he just gives the studios what they demand: A score that fits a deadline, certain quality standards and the budget. If it weren't for Zimmer someone else would have filled his role. It's just what happens to a product or industry that is past its heyday. The same happens, for instance, within the garment industry. Once a (non luxury) brand is well established it "optimizes" the costs of its clothes until people complain that the quality has become unacceptable.

The IBM option ;)

"You never get fired for hiring Zimmer"

Zimmer is a bit of a hack (albeit a very talented one) but I'll take one of his scores any day over Danny Elfman, who seems to arrange everything through a permanent sugar high.

A lot of Elfman's stuff is pretty dark - example Batman Returns.

Or his Oingo Boingo years:

https://vimeo.com/47162346

That piece feels like it's in 7/4 or maybe alternating 4/4,3/4 measures

An unspoken concommitant of this: we don't actually know what things sound like any more. For most people, horses sound like they do in movies. But what we hear in the movies is what the foley artists and the sound designers think horses ought to sound like. It is, as a sound designer friend said 'hyper real'. This was brought home to me when I was watching one of the Lord of the Rings movies. Gimli puts on an over-large suit of chain mail and we hear it falling to the floor. The sound is, I think, either a bunch of Slinkies or some small chains. I know what chain mail sounds like, and it wasn't that. I find myself getting really annoyed with movie sound design now because it's so aritficial. </rant>

To be fair, this is true for anything where you're a subject matter expert. Movie depictions of horses don't sound like real horses. Movie depictions of computer hacking don't look like real computer hacking, either.

I wonder if movie depictions of movie-making are accurate?

Have you seen "La nuit américaine"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_nuit_americaine

It's "Every non-modern weapon goes ZZZZHING!!!!!" when you draw it syndrome.

Tiny daggers, big swords, it's all the same sound. Often it's the same sample. And it's nonsense, because nothing actually sounds like that, outside a sample library.

The article also misses the real point of the music - which is that it's quick and easy to write. It's infinitely easier to get paid by filling space with A GIANT SAMPLE, some repetitive minimalist noodling, or GIGANTIC EPIC DRUMS than it is to write the complex full orchestral counterpoint John Williams is famous for.

It's also easy to sequence this stuff. You can literally copy/paste the same sections over and over in your DAW.

Basically it's filler with a coat of pseudo-classical emulsion to add drama and gravitas. It does the job to meet the budget and create the theme park ride movie experience, but that's all.

Your friend is right in that sound designers aren't always striving for kitchen-sink realism. Tentpole film sound design is often subjective and hyper-real, only because it's both meant to denote how something actually sounds, as well as how the sound makes us feel.

One of the best and examples of this is the bald eagle.

In life, it sounds kind of weedy. In hollywood and TV, it sounds suspiciously like a red-tailed hawk.

So an iconic bird has an iconic sound, but it's not real.

Movies really are full of falsehoods big and small. Scenes showing car interiors usually involve matte effects so that they don't actually have to drive the car in natural light settings. Fight scenes are dance choreography with foley "thwack" sounds. Daytime scenes are shot at dawn or dusk, where the lighting is most forgiving. Nighttime scenes are shot with ample additional lighting so that the actors show clearly. Dialogue is unnatural and written around plot conveniences according to the strict "three-act" structure. Scenes containing dialogue are typically composed of dozens of different cuts, with long takes and ensemble performances being the exceptional cases. Characters walk through doors that are apparently part of the same location, but are actually completely different sets.

And that's describing movies as they were made 40 years ago, before Star Wars renewed film's direction towards pure spectacle. Since "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" it's been possible to make a production that is essentially a live-action cartoon, with actors and a few props superimposed on an otherwise fully CGI world. This is the route that every new blockbuster movie has taken. Even the shots in "Fury Road", which are based on a lot of real vehicles and people doing real stuntwork, have undergone a massive amount of post-processing.

Also worth noting is that the particular ways in which "realistic" things are represented change over time as our understanding of the world shifts: Films depicting war scenes in the 50's or 60's might use WWII or Korean War footage as the inspiration, with large units rappelling or parachuting in, adopting a slightly hunched stance and shooting bursts from the hip to liberate(or oppress) a place or people. Films after the Vietnam war are more likely to focus on small groups engaged in wilderness survival, maintaining communications or finding hidden enemies. The two types of film use different effects and foley, and that isn't purely a matter of budget or technology! The whole aesthetic changed, in a more complex way, to reflect the new design goals.

When you watch films that are very low budget and keep things simple, they tend to look ordinary, because they don't have all this production gloss put on top; their falsehoods, where they show up, are more the ones inherent to film and to storytelling, and not visibly designed effects.

  > I find myself getting really annoyed with movie sound 
  > design now because it's so aritficial.

I don't think this is a modern phenomenon, and I present The Coconut Effect as evidence: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCoconutEffect

B-Movie makers can be very lazy. Just about every action movie that I watched in the synth heavy 80s had the explosion from the Amiga game "Firepower"

Check it out and then try and watch an Arnie Schwarzenegger movie from those days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G4ngPXGGgw

/r/movies calls this BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA and the loathing for it is intense. Other clichés favored by movie trailer editors are a dubstep-like "bass drop" just before something explodes, and the creepy five-year-old singing an echo-ey, unaccompanied version of some happy classic tune to give it a tense, unsettling secondary meaning for a horror film trailer. (I first saw that last in a PSA for some sort of cancer research fund back in the late 90s; the song was "They Can't Take That Away From Me".)

I never really was conscious of, but completely can see in retrosprect, that bass-drop-before-explosion thing you mentioned.

It actually is used a bit in the new Wolfenstein game (The New Order).

Save for the creepy singing 5yo thing, I have to say I enjoy these cliches... even though I know they're meant to manipulate my emotions in a fairly unearned and lazy way, if the rest of the movie/game/piece is compelling and supports it, it works to great effect.

I will say that the solemn girl's choir singing pop-songs (a la Social Network/Scala Choir, or Scream Queens/KTT Pledge) is another one that I see fairly often and very much appreciate.

The "solemn girls' choir" was particularly moving and powerful when it was used for Suo Gân in Empire of the Sun (and it was a boys' choir in that film). Time hasn't been kind to that one for me (though it still fares better than the creepy five-year-old).

My friends and I have taken to imitating it to "add drama" when we are being jerks to each other. We basically use it as a sort of combination punchline/justification in a situation when someone would ask "why"? Want to unplug someone's controller right as they are about to win in Smash Bros? BWAAAAAAAAAAA Want to interfere with a gimme putt to win a round of disc golf? BWAAAAAAAAA

At this point, the sound basically is used as a justification for drama that otherwise mundane and has no real point.

> and the creepy five-year-old singing an echo-ey, unaccompanied version of some happy classic tune to give it a tense, unsettling secondary meaning

"Oh, say can you see, by the dawn's early light..." d-d-d-d-d-bwooosh (football field collapses)

Another: the "bwooo", aka "winding down".

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/37hnx8/same_overuse...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yP3uXtFozv0

I think there is a technological argument that the article doesn't quite get too, as well: the use of subwoofers as an "instrument" to play/score for. Admittedly, theaters have had subwoofers for a long time, but I think its actually the pick up of subwoofers in home theaters and stereo systems that has pushed the trend (in hip-hop/R&B/rap/dubstep) far enough to convince somewhat slow to adapt theatrical composers. Inception seems like the point where Hans Zimmer finally realized he could score for the subwoofers, and in finding a new toy he pushed it to an extreme. It's been interesting to see what film composers (especially, Hans Zimmer) have been doing with subwoofers since Inception, but of course its hard to escape the orbit of that first extreme try and how iconic it was.

This reminds me of "Trajan Pro, the movie font": https://studiobrow.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/trajan.jpg

Once you see it, you'll see it everywhere. So, too, with BRAAAM--it seems like you can't get through a preview of any "action/adventure" movie without several BRAAAMs these days. Lazy, but also apparently effective.

Eh. Some of those have more work put into them, even if they do use the same core typeface. A.i. has it as a subtitle and uses a custom design for the main title; LotR has deliberate misalignment and chipping that at least doesn't appear to be an automatic filter; Star Wars seems to only use it for the (admittedly largest) "Episode II".

They don't mention Koyaanisqatsi!

https://youtu.be/r4WlNj1TTqA?t=30m20s etc

To me the Braaam inception sound is Koyaanisqatsi + loudness wars.

They do say this, to be fair to them:

> Zimmer is in good company: over the last thirty years, film composers have pressed the sound of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Arvo Pärt into service for their soundtracks. Their compositions rely on simple, repeating, and varying patterns that tend to avoid melody. They reduce or remove those foreground melodic elements that would normally carry a scene’s emotions. They rely on smaller ensembles, often entirely made up of strings.

Films seem to mostly use two Reich and Pärt tracks. That one from Glassworks https://youtu.be/6Stu7h7Qup8?t=27m20s and Spiegal Im Spiegal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV4LlCtvgwE

Remembers me the Wilhelm scream (not the sound, but being used everywhere).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_scream [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdbYsoEasio

Yeah but it's for comical reasons nowadays, like a signature. It's not laziness

I live in an industrial park nearly right across the street from a place that casts cement paving stones.

The braaaam sound is exactly the sound that the huge vibrating platform makes when settling the cement in the molds. So much so that I think it might actually be what inspired this sound.

The interesting thing is that every day sounds like an apocalyptic alien invasion around here!

Not an audiophile or amateur by any stretch but this sounds familiar/similar to tripod sounds in the War of the Worlds (2005 edition). That sound has stuck with me. Great visuals in that movie... that train!!

Tripod sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzY099ihULs

The podcast "Reasonably Sound" recently released an episode on the Braaam (originally performed live in September, so I wonder if this is somehow related).

https://soundcloud.com/reasonably-sound/the-braaam

However, it's not the same take at all. The Longreads piece is focused on non-melodic minimalism, and Reasonably Sound is focused on what the Braam really means and its history in storytelling.

I know this just sounds like me being jaded and cynical but being completely open and honest: I feel like filmmaking lost me some time in the last 10 years or so. Might be because of age, I don't know, but I used to be a huge film buff, huge. If you had me filling out a bio about myself and asked me to list interests then "Movies" would be right up there at the top of the list. I loved going to movies, I loved watching them at home, I loved talking about them, I loved knowing little facts and details about them. I used to be able to tell you the name of any major production company from the first half-second of their intro. I used to watch individual scenes over and over again until I memorized them.

Filmmaking was always a delicate balance between creators and business, and I feel like the 2000s are when business finally took over. I'm reminded of the famous morning meeting scene in Robert Altman's "The Player" where a new hotshot producer explains why he thinks creativity should be removed entirely from the filmmaking process, and proceeds to describe an alternative that is horrifyingly close to what we have today.

I have absolutely no illusions about Hollywood prior to my disillusionment. It's always been a cesspit, but it was a beautiful cesspit that seemed to create wonder in spite of itself. Now it's basically just Disney-in-screen-form, everything - and I mean everything - is carefully driven by the beancounters. The last little vestiges of creativity and brilliance were finally squeezed out by the arrival of global markets. Bland, boring sells.

And I read threads like this where people argue about how lazy filmmaking isn't really lazy filmmaking because X Y or Z and all I think is you're moving deck chairs on the titanic. This isn't about soundtracks or sound effects, it's about movies-as-business rather than movies-as-entertainment.

I get it makes the companies major bank, and I get that there's no going back. I'm not ranting saying we should regress. But speaking personally movies went from a big part of my life to something I find extremely off-putting, boring and frankly a little stupid.

I miss enjoying movies.

Film Buff in the making here: there's a lot of fast-food movies out there, but there's also still a lot of art being made. Maybe your local theaters stopped showing indie releases? Maybe you eventually saw so many movies that 'heartfelt, based on a true story feel-good movies' lost their sheen because the tropes are just too familiar to you?

Not sure. I feel like I go and see plenty of good movies (admittedly, I can sometimes see the commoditization in the blockbuster releases trying to be deep), and forgive them their flaws and consider their virtues.

Check out those indie releases!

There's over a century of international cinema available to enjoy; no need to get hung up on the latest releases. While I see current movies and even really enjoy them sometimes (I loved Whiplash, La La Land looks fun, and I always enjoy films by Koreeda), I mainly watch films from the 1930s to the late 1960s. There are so many great works that I'll never be able to watch them all, just as with books. If Ingmar Bergman isn't your thing, maybe Gene Kelly is, or Hitchcock, or Kurosawa, or Fellini, or Argento.

I'm starting to hear the 'Transformers' noise everywhere now, too. It's some algorithmic creation of noises that I would describe as insectoid and metallic.

The "Transformers sound" is distinct and unmistakable; I hear it only in relation to Transformers themselves, and only rarely in the films. It may even be a trademark of Hasbro.

There's a bunch of it in Spectral.

Game of Thrones uses a sound effect for dragon attacks like some of the Transformers sound effects - shame really, spoilt it a bit for me.

GOT:

https://youtu.be/56oIsum8HQc?t=1m57s

Transformers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JySDiW0psM

I didn't get the sense that the sound effect for dragon attacks was meant to be interpreted as being produced by the dragon, I took it as being in the same vein as the "BRAAAM" effect in the article.

Yep. They had dragon vocal effects which were fine but this extra effect was played at the moment of each attack - the incongruity (no obvious cause) + recognition (from other films) broke immersion for me.

IIRC, that's true for the 'classic' transforming sound. The "wub---wub---wub--wub--wub-wub-wubwubwub" from every Michael Bay movie ever is a different story.

The wub noise is what I'm referring to.

Pretty sure I heard that noise or something very very close to it in the latest Star Trek film.

I couldn't find a good example of it in the trailer, but I did note that the trailer is, unsurprisingly, loaded with BRAAAM.

Like a bag of scalpels being shaken around.

I wonder if I just ruined a bit of movie watching. Like back in the days of film, once I saw the reel change dot in the upper right I could never unsee them. No matter what was happening on screen the little man in the brain would pop out and say "reel change coming". Now the little man will pop out and say "BRAAAM!".

This happens to me all the time.

For example, I absolutely loved the Dunkirk's trailer the first time I watched it. Until someone pointed out an actor in the Dunkirk trailer (bottom right side, second guy to look up) who appears to be holding back laughing. Once you're taking out of the films emotional experience it's hard to get back into it. https://youtu.be/rJePvN_4T_E?t=38s

Same with the time I was a kid watching Jurassic Park and noticed the cow they fed the T-Rex looked had a stuffed-animal looking toy eye clearly visible during a close-up. It seemed less scary.

There's a lot of this type of stuff in movies that can really take you out of it. When I hear directors like Stanley Kubrick or Riddley Scott spending 10 hours getting a single shot perfect in Blade Runner I can understand why. The details really do matter.

Reusing this sound effect is just lazy IMO. Just like the jump scare sound effect in all hollywood horror films. It might be pointless to hope for more care to be taken in big productions but I'm still saddened that prioritizing safe easy bets like an obviously reused prominent sound effect is seemingly becoming common practice.

Regardless the best option might be to either stop paying such close attention as ignorance is bliss and/or stop reading reddit comment!

My sister once described to me in very vivid detail the puppet-like manner in which the whale's mouth flops open in Moby Dick (1956). She was only about seven at the time. Now I can't help but laugh every time I see the great white whale breach the water and open its puppety jaws.

In the industry, we call them cigarette burns.

I learned about that from the commentary on a LaserDisc of (I think) "The Graduate". The dick film professor mentioned the reel change circles and then said something like "now that I told you that you will always be conscious of it (hehe)".

> "now that I told you that you will always be conscious of it (hehe)"

Also, your jaw is affected by gravity and you must hold it up manually.

You just ruined my day. Maybe my entire life. Kudos!

If you want to hear a truly unique soundtrack, check out Utopia (British television series): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2f6MfEzhvo

I've never heard anything like it. Highly creative and matches the show's sinister plot perfectly.

I suggest the same but with Interstellar's soundtrack. I personally think is brilliant. No other soundtrack makes me more emotional.

In case you haven't seen this:

https://youtu.be/zg5QMysuSYg

Interstellar strikes a nerve with myself also. I take the dysfunction theme seriously because we are in a Stagnation. There's a thoughtful essay on the subject by the science fiction author Neal Stephenson. He also wrote a book based on it. Surprising few people are aware of that.

http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/fall2011/innovation-starv...

I definitely have. Pretty much everything that is on Youtube about it. Although I personally like much more the originals. They were also made with an organ. It's an incredible complicated piece of instrument.

Edit: awesome read, thanks.

BRAAAM is first heard in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (8 years before Inception): https://youtu.be/3ME5jhsgmB4?t=53 (two in a row spot-on BRAAMs)

One problem is that you can't stop hearing it, after you know. Like Pachelbel Canon [1]. Like orange and blue scenes and posters [2] [3].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM

[2] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OrangeBlueContras...

[3] http://www.slashfilm.com/orangeblue-contrast-in-movie-poster...

And of course an honourable mention for the Wilhelm Scream, which will delight/haunt you for the rest of your film watching life after learning about it. I wonder if it is being used less these days?

It was part of another comment, then I left it out of this list... But I have it on some of my contacts, very easy to know when some specific people are calling me :)

This doesn't necessarily take away from some of the points that the article was making about how film music is used as a status symbol or method of signaling how a film should be received, but there's a nice simple reason why "BRAAAM" is everywhere these days, particularly in a lot of big-budget, CGI-heavy franchise movies. As if often true, time is money in this business; if you're a composer who is brought in to score these films you likely have a shorter-than-average amount of time to do it in and you're well aware that you're not being paid to make art. In other words, there's an enormous amount of pressure to just crank it out quickly. This is how you get scores that sound so generic, and are in fact, the equivalent of aural wallpaper. Studios don't expect anything more and even if they did, composers probably don't have time to write that kind of music. Better to crank out some generic filler and thrown in a few surface-level effects (e.g. "BRAAAM") stolen from better, more interesting scores.

In a similar way, I've been seeing and hearing a lot more of the skirling screeching ascendant strings sound since Lost began using it to indicate high drama just before a commercial break.

I know it existed before then (perhaps its earliest progenitor came out of Psycho) but it seems like this specific use has become more popular in TV scores since Lost started doing it.

See also: Krzysztof Penderecki - Threnody to the victims of Hiroshima (1960) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu371CDZ0ws

Something of an audiofile. This noise bugs the hell out of me. But so do a whole bunch of other "standard" noises in movies. Thunderstorms in most movies sound exactly alike, for instance. I get that movies are primarily a visual medium, but endless sound recycling and fog-horn tooting is really getting on my nerves.

*Audiophile.

Or perhaps just punning, which I fully respect.

Tharkun.wav

Force of habit, I must admit. I won't edit it now, for posterity's sake ;-)

Saw The Arrival the other day and it was constantly blaring this at me. Kind of off putting. When I was at all taken into any moment throughtout the film I was jarred out immediately by this.

My issue with those sounds in Arrival was that I wasn't sure in a few places whether the alien ship was making them, or whether they were part of the soundtrack. This is a hazard of going for the same effect, but trying to do it differently.

At first I thought it was the ship too. Then I came to realize they're trying to get me to have some feeling for a scene where most times I had none. I'd just think "there's that loud sound again."

I happily imagined most if not all of the score was diegetic from the ships, somewhat like the Birdman score.

I think that was the aim; I think the composer was trying to illustrate the ship using music. I can see how one might find that confusing, but I enjoyed it.

Interesting idea. I'll certainly be thinking about that the next time I see the movie.

There is an episode of Song Exploder with the composer: http://songexploder.net/arrival

At the end of the video, the inception sound made me think of the first few seconds of Horsepower, by Justice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQqnL38d0GY But the song came out in 2011, so they probably were inspired by the movie soundtrack.

Also, the "BRAAAM" makes me think of a warhorn, and it's probably why it's used in movies, BRAAAM means to freak us out, like a warhorn.

I can live with that and most of the other audio clichés. Hell, I sometimes even like them.

But one thing that pisses me off is that everyone is using the same goddamn sample for wind effect.

Reminds me a little of the Blaster Beam, surprised that the article didn't mention it's very throaty BRAAAM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q_rIrjJuP4

I'll add it to the list:

Teal and orange tone movies

Super hero pose on one knee

Braaam

VGER.

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