Art by Jon McCormack.
This episode was written and produced by Amelia Tait.
There’s a certain musical phrase that you’ve probably heard hundreds of times. It’s used to emphasize dramatic moments in movies, cartoons, commercials and musicals, most often as a gag. But while this little melody is everywhere today, the question is: Where did it come from? In this episode, we investigate the mysterious origins of a famous 3-note sting. Featuring Sound Historian Patrick Feaster and Composer Dick Walter.
MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE
Just Manners by Alexandra Woodward
Ch@ntrella by 52nd Street
Eneide by Stepping on Glass
At Evenfall by Howard Harper Barnes
Has Pluck by Sound of Picture
Lollygag by Sound of Picture
Waiting by Sound of Picture
Methodology by Sound of Picture
Last Bow feat. Lynnea - Instrumental by Roy Tosh
Evil Plan by Kevin MacLeod
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View Transcript ▶︎
You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.
[music in: Alexandra Woodward - Just Manners]
When you want to know the answer to a question – any question – what do you do? You might text a friend, maaaaybe open a book… But let’s be honest, you probably just Google it. [sfx: typing]
And why not? It’s an easy shortcut to an immediate answer. The internet never fails you, right? Except, when it does. And that’s what happened to British journalist Amelia Tait, when she Googled the origin of a particular sound.
Now, this is a sound that you will definitely recognize. It’s used to emphasize dramatic moments in cartoons and movies and musicals, most often as a gag. And Amelia wanted to know where this sound originally came from. But, Google…
[music out]
[sfx: whistley wind]
Didn’t have an answer.
[clip: Shock Horror A]
Amelia: So it started for me, when I was watching an episode of Bob's Burgers.
That’s Amelia.
Amelia: And it had this sound effect. [clip: Bob’s Burgers – Dun, Dun, Dun]
So I was like, "Huh, where exactly did this sound come from?" And I Googled it.
[music in: Sound of Picture - Has Pluck]
Well, I'm curious what search terms you did immediately, like did you immediately think, "dun dun dun?"
Amelia: Right. So first of all, I guess the problem is like, how do you write "dun, dun, dun"? Some people write "dum, dum, dum," some people write, "da, da, da." Um, I think I'm a dun dun dun purist.
I’m a dun dun dun purist, too. It’s dun dun dun.
Amelia: Yeah, the two short duns, and then the one many-U'ed duuun at the end. And I Googled "Where did it come from?" And to my surprise, because this rarely ever happens, there was nothing. I mean, there were forum posts, there were Reddit posts, there were Quora posts, but there was nothing official.
You found something not Google-able. That's amazing.
Amelia: Right, which is kind of a reporter’s dream I think.
Yeah.
[music out]
So Amelia did what any good journalist would do when faced with an unanswered question: She set out to answer it. She started by thinking back to where she might have first heard the sound.
Amelia: I can't remember the first time I heard a dun, dun, dun. I definitely remember it being common in cartoons and sitcoms when I was a kid, things like SpongeBob Squarepants and the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
[clip: Fresh Prince]
Amelia: Although Google couldn't tell me exactly where dun dun dun came from, various forum users said that the sound was something called a sting.
Amelia: Are you familiar with what a sting is?
Yeah, so I think of a sting as like the end of a phrase or some sort of punctuation of a phrase, and I kind of imagine it as being something that would have been done in radio, you know, when radio was the main form of entertainment. And then there's all these little like musical things that would happen just to kind of nudge you to go, "Hey, you should feel that."
Amelia: That's exactly right, I mean, it's a piece of punctuation, a piece of musical shorthand that communicates an emotion really rapidly.
Here’s a good one from a 1940s radio drama called The Mysterious Traveler.
[clip: Mysterious Traveler]
Amelia: Stings can punctuate a gag, [clip: Cartoon Coda H], or something mysterious, [clip: Strange Going Ons], or even set up a blissful domestic scene. [clip: Nice Neighbors B]
Amelia: Today, dun, dun, dun is more of a parody sting. It usually communicates comedy, not genuine suspense. But when I reached out to radio historians to trace the origin of the sound, they told me it was once used in radio dramas to legitimately shock and excite listeners.
[music in: Ch@ntarelle - 52nd Street]
Amelia: In those early days, it really did have that powerful effect that could make you kind of shudder. Which, I don't know about you, it's kind of hard for me to imagine because we're so used to it as a parody sound, right?
Yeah, but back in, I don't know, the forties or something I can imagine shock and [gasp] right after it.
Amelia: Right, yeah.
Amelia: But who exactly was the first radio producer to use dun, dun, dun on air? None of the radio historians I reached out to had an exact answer. Though one pointed me towards Suspense, a horror show broadcast on CBS radio from 1942 to 1962. This is the opening of its very first episode.
[music out]
[clip: Suspense]
Amelia: And three minutes in, this little bit of drama happens:
[clip: Suspense]
Amelia: It sounds slightly more like a, ba, ba, ba then a dun, dun, dun, but either way, it wasn't one of the world's first. Media professor Richard Hand told me that radio dramas weren't always cutting edge. They borrowed tropes that already existed in other popular media, ie. Stage melodramas.
[music in: Kevin MacLeod - Evil Plan]
Amelia: Melodramas are highly sensationalized, highly emotional plays that often focus on a straightforward battle between good and evil, usually with a ton of musical cues.
So I'm thinking almost like piano players in a theater type of era?
Amelia: Exactly, yeah. So there'd be someone playing these stings or these big organ movements, live in the theater. Like somebody's tied to a railroad track and there's some jaunty little music that's kind of making you tense. [sfx: tense] All of those things that came from melodrama [sfx: old radio] were basically borrowed by the radio or imported, to kind of just make the listeners be more comfortable and be more familiar with what they were listening to.
[music out]
Amelia: But while radio clips can easily be found on YouTube, it's much harder to track down melodrama’s dun, dun, duns. Let alone the very first one.
[music in: Sound of Picture - Lollygag]
Patrick Feaster: The very first dun dun dun. The holy grail of dun, dun, duns. I don't know whether that's something we can ever track down.
Amelia: That's Patrick Feaster, co-founder of the First Sounds Initiative, an organization which hunts down the earliest ever sound recordings.
Patrick Feaster: On the one hand, we think it's worthwhile to be able to listen back as far in time as we can. And on the other hand, I think it helps us understand more about the history of sound recording, where this miracle of being able to record and playback sound came from, what people have done with it at different times, and all of that.
Amelia: But Patrick thinks that the world's first dun, dun, dun probably wasn't recorded at all.
Patrick Feaster: My guess is maybe it happened with some theater orchestra in some obscure little theater out in the Midwest or the far west someplace with an audience of 50 people from some local town, a touring, vaudeville troop out there. And, uh, nobody ever thought to write it down. Nobody remembered it. It could have happened there. Someplace like that.
Amelia: So would it ever be possible to track down the very first dun, dun, dun?
Patrick Feaster: Of course there are scores, I assume, for the music accompanying stage melodramas. But just playing a stinger chord doesn't require a whole lot of arrangement ahead of time. It's not like an extended piece of music so that, you know, that could be something that was just worked out between the conductor and the orchestra. They might never have even written it down.
[music out]
So you hopped in a time machine and went back to 1888.
Amelia: So I hopped in a time machine, yes. Yeah. And I put my microphone to the mouths of the melodrama going public.
They were like, "What is this?" And then they put you in jail.
Amelia: Yes. Yeah. Which I'm still there. I'm awaiting execution. We might have to wait for a time machine to truly get the answer to this question.
Amelia: Without a time machine, the very first dun, dun, dun might be lost, but Patrick helped me dig around for some early examples of recorded versions of the sting.
Patrick Feaster: I knew that there was a subgenre of parodies of stage melodrama.
Amelia: Remember our damsel in distress, tied up on the railroad tracks?
Patrick Feaster: Plays like this were very popular back around the late 19th century, early 20th century. And they were very popular, but people also already recognized that they were a little bit overblown, and so people back then already liked to make fun of them. And there had been a number of recordings that people made, specifically to poke fun at the melodrama.
Amelia: Hunting for a dun, dun, dun Patrick looked at these recordings. He listened to one from 1896 and another from 1905, but found nothing.
Patrick Feaster: But then there was this third recording, "Desperate Desmond" by Fred Duprez, recorded in 1912.
[clip: Desperate Desmond 1]
Patrick Feaster: Desperate Desmond is a parody of melodrama that presents itself as a session where the author of a melodrama is working with the musical director to figure out what music they're going to play at specific critical points during the unfolding of the drama.
[clip: Desperate Desmond 2]
Amelia: And it's this comedian, making fun of all these tropes.
[clp: Desperate Desmond 3]
Amelia: Did you notice that dun? [clip: Desperate Desmond 4] There are others peppered throughout the clip. [clip: Desperate Desmond 5]
Amelia: Now these were only single or double duns, not triple duns, not full blown, dun, dun duns.
They didn't realize the power of a third dun yet.
Amelia: Right, right. Which is slightly disappointing, you know? I wanted my three dun holy grail. But what Patrick kind of extrapolated from this and pointed out was that it must've been so entrenched in the culture at that point to invite parody, and possibly the third dun came along because that's even more simpler shorthand, right?
Patrick Feaster: The three notes are much more likely to be recognizable as a conscious attempt to play on this stinger chord as an overused convention. If you just do a dun, dun, maybe nobody will be sure if you're making fun of it or not. But if you do all three” dun, dun, dun!” well, everybody knows what you're getting at.
Amelia: So already by 1912, dun stings were so commonplace that people parodied them. But let's go further back. Back to those 19th century Midwestern theater halls, where the sound genuinely did provoke an emotional response. What exactly is it about a dun a dun and a lingering duuun that can be so provocative?
[music in: Eneide - Stepping on Glass]
Dick Walter: It's based on the interval of a tritone, the flattened fifth, which is known as the Devil's Interval. [sfx: tritone]
Amelia: That's Dick Walter, a composer with over 50 years of experience making music.
Dick Walter: It's the interval in Western music that denotes tension. It's the one interval which is unresolved, and is unsatisfactory. Obviously, that interval has been around for centuries and has been a characteristic of tense music.
Amelia: In medieval times, Catholic officials supposedly found the trione so unsettling that they labeled it, “The Devil in Music,” and banned its use in religious compositions. Uh, as it turns out, that's probably a myth.
Dick Walter: But, it's always been used as the interval that will create tension.
[music out]
Amelia: Harmonically, the tritone sits right between a perfect fourth [sfx: perfect fourth] and a perfect fifth [sfx: perfect fifth]. But while those intervals are harmonious and pleasant, the Tritone sounds very dissonant, at least to Western ears. [sfx: tritone]
Amelia: You can hear it in this version of the dun, dun, dun. [clip: Shock Horror A]
Amelia: Most of the time, when you hear a tritone, it's only played for a brief second before the notes change into something more harmonious.
Dick Walter: Sometimes that interval resolves very quickly, and the two examples that I always think of are “Maria” from West Side Story [clip West Side Story – Maria] And then the other one is the start of The Simpsons TV theme. [clip: Simpsons Theme Song]
Dick Walter: So those two songs, there's a momentary moment of tension [sfx: tension] and it resolves, [sfx: resolve 1] The melody goes up a semitone to perfect fifth and that is an instant resolution. [sfx: resolve 2]
Amelia: In its most common form, the dun, dun, dun does the opposite. Rather than putting the trione in the middle and quickly resolving it, it ends on the tritone. [sfx: tritone] Without a resolution, the Devil's Interval leaves the listener tense, hence the dramatic power of a dun, dun, dun.
[music in: Howard Harper - At Evenfall]
But Dick Walter isn't just an expert on tritones. He isn't just a composer with decades of experience. His connection to the dun dun dun goes far deeper.
Dun Dun Dun.
Amelia: That's coming up after the break.
[music out]
MIDROLL
[music in: Howard Harper - At Evenfall]
Amelia: Since the Victorian era, music directors have been using dramatic dun dun duns to accentuate shocking moments in their productions. And with the advent of radio and film duns became even more common. [clip: dun dun dun]
Amelia: By the early 20th century, these stingers were already such a cliche that they were used as gags in comedic recordings, like Desperate Desmond.
[music out]
[clip: Desperate Desmond clip]
Amelia: But in the thirties and forties, radio dramas like Suspense took dun dun dun back to its sinister roots. [clip: Suspense] And in 1940, a variation of it was used in Disney's Fantasia to punctuate a dramatic dinosaur death. [clip: Fantasia]
Amelia: In mid-century television and film, the sound became a parody again, culminating in 1974's comedy horror, Young Frankenstein. [clip: Young Frankenstein Stings]
Amelia: You might recognize that version of the sting as one that underscores a 2007 viral video where a chipmunk dramatically turns to look at the camera. [clip: Young Frankenstein Sting]
Amelia: But in the modern world, one dun dun duuun recording is so good that producers use it over and over again. If you hear the sound today on the radio or on TV, it's likely you're hearing one specific recording from 1984. [clip: Shock Horror A]
Amelia: What you've just heard is a recording known as Shock Horror A. And it turns out the person who composed that recording was none other than our guest, Dick Walter. [clip: Shock Horror A]
Dick Walter: It's funny, isn't it? That, I've actually been, to put it pompously, a professional composer for 50 years, and I've done loads of different things, and yet it's Shock Horror A that is the one that stimulates all the interest.
Shock Horror A? He must have had the instinct spot on because I'm so curious if B was a big step down from this one.
Amelia: Well, funny, you should mention that because I have Shock Horror B right here.
[clip: Shock Horror B]
Amelia: It's fine, sure. But Shock Horror A is the recording that became a classic. In 1983, Dick was asked to compose a whole suite of musical stings and sound effects for a sound library called KPM Music. Remember this? [clip: Cartoon Coda H] and this? [clip: Strange Going Ons]
Amelia: Dick composed them all. They were part of a collection known as the Editor's Companion. It was four vinyl records of compositions that were sold to producers who needed short musical cues. [clip: Rodeo Link A-1]
Dick Walter: The Editor's Companion was, uh, it's a sort of poisoned chalice because do you really want to write lots and lots of very short pieces of music, which maybe will never get used? [clip: Wa, Wa, Wa, Waa]
Dick Walter: If you write a piece of music that lasts 15 seconds, you still got to have an idea. So in some ways, writing a very short piece isn't that much easier than writing a long piece.
Amelia: But fortunately for Dick, there was one particular piece that sound editors started grabbing onto. It was our favorite little stinger, Shock Horror A. Over the years, this exact recording has been used everywhere.
[clip: Lego Batman] [clip: Spongebob] [clip: Roseanne]
Amelia: Sure, there are some exceptions. Take this scene from Muppets Haunted Mansion. [clip: Muppets Haunted Mansion]
Amelia: But Shock Horror A is the undisputed champion.
[clip: Kellogg's Krave Ad] [clip: Full House]
Okay, so you found the person who made our quintessential dun, dun, dun. So there's gotta be inspiration for that. Like he's got, he must have been like, "Okay, this is my A game. This is the number one shock suspense track. You know, it's going on vinyl. I've got to make sure this is what people are going to want to listen to on their turntables." So there must be some sort of like inspiration for that.
Amelia: Exactly. So I asked Dick, you know, "Where did this come from? How did you even kind of begin to come up with this little phrase that could be used over and over again?" And he told me, well, he mentioned the Devil's Interval.
Dick Walter: It's all based on that Devil's Interval. [sfx: devil’s interval]
Amelia: And he mentioned that he liked jazz, and the Devil's Interval comes up in jazz.
Dick Walter: The beboppers, the modern jazz beboppers of the late 1940s, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and those guys… [clip: Charlie Parker] The biggest characteristic of that music was the flattened fifth.
Amelia: But he told me that his mother was an amateur pianist who loved to play Victorian melodrama.
[music in: Kevin MacLeod - Evil Plan]
Dick Walter: My mother was an amateur pianist, and she used to play for amateur dramatic groups. The legacy from her was sort of Victoriana and melodrama.
Oh, well, how about that?
Amelia: Yeah, so it all connects!
[music out]
Amelia: So Dicks 1980s track can, in a way, be traced back to the 1880s. But of course, when he was composing, he had no idea that any of the pieces in the Editor's Companion would ever catch on.
[music in: Sound of Picture - Waiting]
Amelia: How do you feel about the fact that it has become so popular and is so enduring?
Dick Walter: I'm flattered. I mean, it's great. What's nice is that it works. You know, if you get asked to do something, somebody says, "Write a thing, a piece of music that does the following," and then over the next 10, 20 years, you find it's being used for exactly that purpose, that's very nice because it means you've done the job.
Dick Walter: There are three things you can get out of music. One is money, which we all hope for. A second one is an ego massage. And the third one is fun. And if you get a job where all three things come your way, that's amazing. I mean, that's, that's heaven. It was a lot of fun. And it's jolly nice when people say to you, "Oh, can we talk to you on a podcast about Shock Horror, your four and a half seconds?"
[music out]
Amelia: So what makes this particular version of the dun dun dun so effective? Dick thinks it might be because it features a live orchestra of 30 to 40 people who he conducted for the recording.
Dick Walter: I think the fact that it's orchestral, [sfx: orchestra tuning] it's live players, I think does make a difference because it's that quality, which I think makes something timeless. I'm not suggesting it sounds remotely contemporary. And it's not that it sounds out of date. It just is timeless because you have a very good recording of very good players playing something properly, you know, with, with conviction. [sfx: orchestra]
Amelia: Still, no matter how well the orchestra plays it, that doesn't mean people are going to take dun, dun, dun seriously today.
Amelia: I just cannot imagine it ever being used legitimately again to actually make us feel shock and horror. Um, do you feel the same way?
Not in the same vibe. Maybe like if it was just slowed down significantly. [clip: slow dun dun] like the flow of it was just much more slow, but I can't imagine it ever playing in a serious role again, and I would be happy to challenge horror and suspense directors to do that.
Amelia: Yes. Let's put that out there as a challenge. Please use a genuinely frightening dun, dun, dun.
[clip: slow dun dun]
Amelia: So we took our search for the first dun, dun, dun all the way back to the dawn of recorded sound, but that still wasn't early enough, because this musical phrase seems to have begun before the first musical recordings were ever made.
Amelia: The mystery of the dun, dun, dun is a lingering one. Exactly like the final note of the phrase itself. There are undoubtedly more dun, dun, duns out there in dusty archives, waiting to be uncovered. But the very first one may just be beyond our reach.
[music in: Sound of Picture - Methodology]
And, if someone out there listening has a functional time machine that can get you back to about 1850, or so. Actually, I don't know when theaters and stuff, you probably want to like plop down in New York, probably in the late 1800s would be a good start, but then they'd be probably be like, "Well, I heard this in England when I was a child."
And then, you know, then you have to go to the—it's just, it's, you know, a lot of travel, which is difficult back then. That's if the time machine can kind of put you wherever you want, or if it just right back down exactly where you're at, which would be incredibly inconvenient. If, if the time machine did it that way.
Amelia: So we need a time slash teleportation machine.
And on top of that, like flying through the universe, so like even the same spot that was one second ago is like a million miles away in the middle of space. So it's just really complicated to make this happen.
Amelia: Oh, that’s too much for my brain.
But if someone has figured out that entire thing, I really want to know where these dun dun duns originated from.
Amelia: Same. I want to know the very first one. So we'll wait for that.
We'll wait for that.
[music out]
[music in: Roy Tosh - Last Bow Instrumental]
Twenty Thousand Hertz is hosted by me, Dallas Taylor, and produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. Hear more by following Defacto Sound on Instagram.
This episode was written and produced by Amelia Tait, and Casey Emmerling, with help from Sam Rinebold. It was sound designed and mixed by Jai Berger.
Thanks to our guests Patrick Feaster and Dick Walter. To learn more about Patrick’s First Sound Initiative, visit firstsounds dot org or click the link in the show description. You can find Dick Walter’s compositions anywhere you get your music. To learn more about his work, visit dickwalter dot CO dot UK.
Here at Twenty Thousand Hertz, we’ve made several other episodes about classic sounds that have been used again and again. We did one about the Wilhelm Scream,
[sfx: scream]
one about the Dies Irae,
[sfx: dies irae]
and more recently, and one about the waterphone.
[sfx: waterphone]
**If you haven’t heard those, go check them out. And if there’s one you’ve heard, and love already, tap the share button and send it to someone you know will love it too.
Thanks for listening.
[music out]
