Longreads:
You walk into a local multiplex a few minutes after the lights have dimmed. You find your seat to the first trailer, some confection involving superheroes or zombies. 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.
The internet and the sound’s creator refer to it as BRAAAM. It may sound synthetic, but it’s usually produced with brass instruments and a prepared piano. 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. Is BRAAAM something that happened to us, or is it something we, as moviegoers, desired?
Along with the “Wilhelm Scream“, probably one of the most recognizable, and therefore annoying, sounds in movies today.
The “Wilhelm Scream” used to be an inside joke among movie sound editors and/or mixers. Then it became an inside joke among movie buffs. And now it’s a sound effect that everyone knows. Only first-time big-budget film directors think it’s cool any more.
As for BRAAAM, well, I’m sure it will get thrown down the same staircase that “IN A WORLD …” was thrown down many years ago. At least in terms of being run into the ground in all manner of trailers and teasers. BRAAAM is a simplified version of the huge brass chord used in the score for”Batman Begins” and its sequels (composed by, yes, Hans Zimmer among others.)
I certainly agree about the Wilhelm scream. It’s such a small thing but I really find it annoying — but it was annoying the very first time it was pointed out to me as a thing.
BRAAAM, on the other hand, still sounds kinda cool to me. And at least there’s variation in BRAAAM. Wilhelm is always the same.
I was saying myself the same exact thing during trailers yesterday
The Wilhelm is just one of a bunch of stock sound effects we can hear being re-used if we’re listening for them, like the echoey water-dripping sound I first heard in Quake I, and then again in Fight Club, and then again in…
I like spotting the Wilhelm. But movie trailers are commercials, and we’ve all had decades to get used to how far more imitative and formulaic they can be. Remember how many movie trailers we heard scored with James Horner’s “Bishop’s Countdown” after 1986?
This is why going to a theater can still be great; with the right crowd around you, everyone is laughing at the clichés.
Could have sworn I heard the beginnings of the BRAAAM in the first Star Trek movie.
Nope. The instrument that made that sound is called a “blaster beam.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_Beam
Youtube has videos of it being demonstrated.
I sit corrected. Thanks, Mo.
Agree about “Bishop’s Countdown.” I watched my old bit-rotting DVD of “Aliens” (for the umpteenth time) with James Cameron’s commentary audio track, and he mentions how much that one musical cue has been either re-used by the studio or plagiarized in many other movies.
I watched the sequel to get in the mood for a one-off screening of the original “Alien” (1979) at a boutique theater in Oakland, CA. called The New Parkway. I very rarely get out to Oakland. And to my horror, the next day I read about the massive warehouse fire just a few miles away that same night.
Horner also composed my favorite “Star Trek” movie theme, from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Yes, it’s heavy with layer upon layer of “pictorial” rolling-waves-and-wind-in-billowing-sails motifs. Horner didn’t hold anything back and gave it the full Horatio Hornblower seafaring effect. But it works equally well “In the 23rd century …” for a space opera as it would have for a 19th century naval adventure. So sad, again, that Horner died in a plane crash just last year.
Sure enough. I love TWOK’s soundtrack. It’s a great launching point to investigate, say, Mahler symphonies for some of Horner’s influences.
Jerry Goldsmith is a bit harder for me to nail down, but I’m right there with Stravinsky and Copland. 😉
It’s gotten to where if I hear that sound in a trailer, my brain immediately decides the movie is not worth watching. The other sound I’ve grown to hate is that subsonic bass drop, usually accompanying a slow motion action shot. So tired.