4 ms·
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 dramat
by Declanomous 10y ago
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.
- hood_syntax 10y agoI completely agree with that sidenote, in particular where did that "M" come from?!
- Declanomous 10y agoI 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.
- JumpCrisscross 10y agoThey wanted the hardness of "R" over "W" and didn't want to seem like they were screaming about brasserie?
- umanwizard 10y agoLol. You probably mean brassière, not brasserie (which means "brewery")
- fornever 10y agoMost 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.
- zodPod 10y agoInterestingly 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.
- stcredzero 10y ago...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/ https://xkcd.com/311/ There was that 1st person movie, which actually was kinda cool, but it made me nauseous.
- HemanHeartYou 10y agoFury Road
- CamperBob2 10y agoWeird 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.
- Declanomous 10y ago> 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.
- ashark 10y agoHalf Life 2 (2004) uses it some for various alien ships. (new War of the Worlds: 2005, Cloverfield: 2008)
- Declanomous 10y agoThat 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.