While the sound used in the eventual score was Zimmer's (based on a slowed down version of Édith Piaf's ' Non, je ne regrette rien', which also plays an important role in the plot), Zarin accused Zimmer of improperly taking credit in his Vulture interview. Zarin claimed that the sound that emerged began with the sound effect that others had used in the second trailer.

Rosenthal encouraged him to turn it into 'a sound that cleared the room', and Brown suggested adding 'a brass edge to it'. He was also told to create a sound for a visual: 'if you imagined your hand was buried in sand, and you're slowly lifting it up, and you see something is starting to appear, and then all of a sudden the hand appears, and so then it's very clear'. Mike Zarin worked with Dave Rosenthal and Lauri Brown on the first Inception teaser trailer, working with a variety of subway and foley sounds to fit with the only scene which was available to him at the time. He arranged for brass instruments to be played into a piano, which was positioned in a church with a pedal held down, to which sound he later added 'a bit of electronic nonsense'. Hans Zimmer, who composed the score for Inception, said in an interview with Vulture that he created the sound to satisfy the screenplay's description of 'massive, low-end musical tones, sounding like distant horns'. It is frequently associated with the 2010 film Inception, although multiple people associated with the film have taken credit for it. And then I added a bit of electronic nonsense. The sound, really, is that I put a piano in the middle of a church and I put a book on the pedal, and these brass players would basically play into the resonance of the piano. Whereas that style of separating sound design from the score helped separate the intensity of the film experience from the real world, 'BRAAAM is an extreme kind of film scoring' which 'means to freak us out'. It is the sound we know is coming when a trailer intercuts CGI objects slamming into each other with portentous fades-to-black.' Daub argued that BRAAAM contrasted with the scores of 1970s blockbusters which used environmental, ambient sounds to ground the film in a realistic atmosphere before transitioning to the fictionalized world and beginning the score. Literary scholar Adrian Daub called the sound 'the noise that goes with people in spandex standing in a Delacroix-style tableau, or so Hollywood has decided. Ĭreators of the documentary Score called it 'a staple of the modern film trailer-the brassy foghorn-like sound used as a way to emphasize something important'. Vulture reported that the sound in Inception was created by four different wind instruments all playing the same note simultaneously and loudly – the bassoon, French horn, trombone and tuba – accompanied by a timpani. Seth Abramovitch of The Hollywood Reporter described the sound as 'like a foghorn on steroids' which is 'meant to impart a sense of apocalyptic momentousness'. One of the best-known examples also involved a prepared piano. Description īRAAAM is a loud, low sound typically produced using real or synthesized brass instruments. The sound and its variants are often referred to as the ' Inception sound', the ' Inception noise' or the ' Inception horn'. It is commonly associated with the 2010 film Inception, but the origin of the sound as it appeared in the film is disputed. Problems playing this file? See media help.īRAAAM (sometimes uncapitalized, or with varying numbers of repeated letters) is a loud, low sound that became popular in trailers for action films in the 2010s.

Inception fog horn sound effect