Listen to Hans Zimmer’s scores for Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies on CD in isolation from the image, and you’ll find yourself thinking, “oh, I thought Batman’s cape made that noise!”Ĭomedies have often exploited our tendency to associate orchestral music with a certain placelessness.
But this is a separation that soundtracks have tended to break down in the last few decades. There can be something deeply reassuring in this neat separation between music and sound design: we move from one thing to another in stages, like nodding off into a dream. John Williams and the sound designers are careful to stage a gradual progression from our ocean to the fictional one of the film. It belongs to cinema and to one single predator: everywhere there is water, there is that bass, there is Jaws. Once we finally see the ocean, the sound design signals to us that this is no longer our ocean, with its million garbled noises and distant signals. It sounds like a real, recognizable ocean. This first minute of Jaws insulates the viewer from all the horror ahead: when we don’t see the ocean, we hear it. 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)
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