On screen, a dramatic “dun, dun duuun” has appeared in everything from Disney’s Fantasia to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to The IT Crowd. In 2007, a YouTuber scored a video of a melodramatic prairie dog with the three beats, earning over 43m views and a solid place in internet history. Yet though many of us are familiar with the sound, no one seems to know exactly where it came from. Try to Google it and … dun, dun, duuun! Its origins are a mystery.
Taken together, these three duns are what’s known as a sting – a brief bit of music that media producers can use to break up the action or punctuate a theatrical moment. While today’s dun dun duuuns are often employed jokingly to parody the dramas of days gone by, the suspenseful sound was once legitimately used to frighten and thrill.
“One of the challenges of radio – and it’s the same now as it was 100 years ago – is how do you hook the listener?” says Richard Hand, a media professor at the University of East Anglia and author of Terror on the Air! Horror Radio in America, 1931-1952. Alongside orchestral stings, sound effects such as clock chimes, claps of thunder, and whistling wind were used to grab the audience’s attention in the early days of radio, as the medium has always invited multitasking.“Those dramatic organ stings could have a powerful effect.”
Before the development of sound libraries, many of these stings were performed live. “They became cliched and we laugh at them, but actually what soundscapes can do can be extraordinary.”
Suspense, an American horror show broadcast on CBS Radio between 1942 and 1962, was filled to the brim with sound effects and dramatic stings. Just over three minutes into its first episode (after bells, the sound of a train, and plenty of piano), a three-beat sting lingers on its last note when a man discovers his wife is potentially an undead poisoner. But it’s difficult to pinpoint the very first on-air dun dun duuun, and it’s likely the musical phrase predates the radio. Hand says the medium tended to adopt already popular tropes to entice listeners. “They imported that musical structure and musical language,” he says, pointing to Victorian stage melodramas.
In fact, Patrick Feaster – an expert in the preservation of early sound media, and co-founder of the First Sounds Initiative – argues that dun dun duuun could have been a cliche long before the advent of radio drama. Though he doesn’t know when or where the three duns arose, he points out that stings “that work in much the same way” appeared in the 1912 melodrama parody Desperate Desmond by comedian Fred Duprez.