HundredthMile

Caution: Loud action movie sounds ahead.

What you just heard upon loading this page was the infamous BRAAAM from 2010 Christopher Nolan classic, Inception. The mysterious sound has made its way to trailers for almost every recent action/thriller movie.

Phonetically, BRAAAM is an onomatopoeia – a word, when said out loud, mimics a sound. The internet has collectively decided that it needs to be spelled in upper-case with three As in order to replicate the scope of the sound. The BRAAAM is to thriller/sci-fi movies what a sting is to the horror genre.

While many consider Inception composer Hans Zimmer to be the father of the BRAAAM, its source of origin is controversial.

Zimmer, Zarin, or Hemsey?

Nolan incorporated the piercing sound directly into the Inception screenplay by writing it next to scenes. According to Zimmer, Nolan described the BRAAAMs as “massive, low-end musical tones, sounding like distant horns.”

Zimmer’s BRAAAM came about as a result of experimentation.  In a 2013 interview, he said, “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. And then I added a bit of electronic nonsense.”

Shortly afterward, composer Mike Zarin came forward to claim the BRAAAM as his invention. Zarin was hired to work on the teaser trailer which was made long before Zimmer was attached to the production. The only reference shot available to Zarin at the time featured Leonardo DiCaprio riding a train. Unsurprisingly, Zarin began working on his version of the BRAAAM with train sounds captured using foley on a subway.  After further processing and mixing with pitch-shifted brass samples, Zarin sent an early version to Nolan. The director responded by sending ‘Always a Catch‘ from The Dark Knight score and requested Zarin to work around it. The final result was the teaser BRAAAM.

Hans Zimmer officially joined the music department with the second trailer. Upon the director’s request, Zimmer redesigned the BRAAAM by adding a layer of strings on top of an interpolated version of Zarin’s sound design. Eventually, a re-arranged version of the score from this trailer ended up in the film as a track named ‘528491‘. Zarin believes this is the point where he lost ownership of the BRAAAM to Zimmer.

The most popular version of the Inception BRAAAM was introduced in the final trailer though. Audiences, now familiar with both Zarin and Zimmer’s rendition, experienced an updated BRAAAM through the trailer score composed by Zack Hemsey. Zarin claims that the new composer also used his work as a starting point. However, Hemsey’s BRAAAM had a musical quality compared to Zarin’s version which acted more as a sound design element; the former considers it a musical device that has always existed.

Hemsey’s score, alongside his BRAAAM, was later released online as a track called ‘Mind Heist‘ which quickly took off. You might come across BRAAAM buttons over the internet which solely present Hemsey’s version. South Park created a beatbox version in its season 14 parody episode, ‘Insheeption.’ Soon, every modern action blockbuster started using/abusing some version of the BRAAAM.

For more background on the BRAAAM, check out this podcast.