The ‘Inception’ Horn has become a film trailer cliche

IT is used in movie trailers and TV commercials and even hit songs. It’s become the sound of our times. So where did it come from and why won’t it go away? Listen here.

IT’S the noise of our times — a big, blaring horn blast that is cropping up everywhere in popular culture at the moment: from movie trailers to TV commercials and hit songs.

You know this sound, variously referred to in print as the BRAMMM, the BWONNNG or the BRRNNN sound.

It’s the sound that signals something VERY BIG is taking place, or about to. Something AWESOME, and POSSIBLY TERRIFYING, and something that in written language would be deserving of ALL CAPS.

Need to hear it? Click here.

But what is this portentous noise, and why is it everywhere? Channel Seven appear particularly fond of deploying it in their commercials, particularly when they are advertising a sensational Sunday Night expose.

And Hollywood has made it their own, using a blaring horn variant in any number of trailers for upcoming blockbusters.

A further variation of it has even made an appearance in a pop track — Nicky Minaj’s Pound the Alarm — where it acts as a break between the song’s Jamaican-style sections and its pounding techno-style sections.

Film buffs have dubbed this powerful sound the “Inception horn”, tracing its roots back to the score for Christopher Nolan’s stylish 2010 movie Inception, which starred Leonardo DiCaprio and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

The film’s composer Hans Zimmer told the website Vulture that the distinctive basso profundo sound arose from his desire to experiment for the film. He created the sound by recording brass instruments playing through a resonating piano within a church.

But others dispute the genesis of the BRAMMM!

Some hear its likeness in the scores for the original Transformers film (2007) or The Dark Knight (2008), while others detect similarities in a sound effect used in the Star Wars prequel Attack of the Clones, when Jango Fett deploys his bombs in an asteroid field.

The sound is clearly a feature of the track Mind Heist, which composer Zack Ramsey created for Inception, but composer and sound designer Mike Zarin (who worked on the original trailer for the movie) said the sound arose from a collaborative process. He told IndieWire that the editor of the first trailer, Dave Rosenthal, wanted him to “create a sound that cleared the room, kind of like a Tibetan bell”.

Whatever the truth on the various creative inputs used to create the BRAMMM!, nobody could deny it has gone on to become a cliche of action film trailers — a fact that irritates Zimmer.

“Oh, it’s horrible!” he told Vulture. “This is a perfect example of where it all goes wrong. That music became the blueprint for all action movies, really. And if you get too many imitations, even I get confused.”

A film trailer producer who spoke to News Corp said the Inception horn had been ripped off by every major studio but was now considered “old hat”.

So to mix pop cultural expressions, has the Inception horn jumped the shark? Will the next trend in sound design feature something even deeper, even darker and even more bowel-shaking? Is that even sonically possible? We’ll see. As the movie trailers themselves are fond of putting it: “Stay tuned. Coming soon.”