Can you hear it? Those three notes evoke suspense, horror, and—sometimes—comedy.
It’s a sound you’ve been familiar with since you’ve been able to mimic sounds. It’s the three-beat musical phrase that creates suspense as the big reveal slowly approaches in a shadowy form, building the tension with a dun, then another dun, ending with an erupting duuun!
The dramatic “dun, dun, duuun” has appeared on screen in everything from Despicable Me 2 to Young Frankenstein to The IT Crowd. You probably know the sound best from the video of a melodramatic prairie dog quickly turning as the three beats play. The YouTube video currently sits at 43.5 million views and is a solid piece of meme history.
While we all know the sound and immediately know how to react, does anyone know where it came from?
Strangely enough, Google doesn’t even know the origins of the sound, but The Guardian might have discovered the source.
Author: Alyssa Miller
This article comes from No Film School and can be read on the original site.
