[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

For those of you who saw Inception, an experiment to find the source of the BWWWAAAAAAA [warning: auto-play] sound, using the soundtrack’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” by Edith Piaf as source material:

In the dream world, time is sped up, usually by five times usual speed.  However, in the final dream sequence, it is stated that they are using a special sedative that accelerates dream time to 25 times the speed of the real world.  

At the end of the film, the crew finds themselves three dreams deep in the “Ice World,” and thusly, dream time is going really, really fast.  

A song playing at normal speed in the real world would end up playing drastically slower in a dream three levels deep. (Think of it in terms of the van falling, the van falls in a few seconds, but they have an hour or two of time on the third level of the dream.)

So based on this I took the song “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” and slowed down the first 10 seconds of it by 70%.  The end result is about 40 seconds long, you’ll notice the “BWAAAA” sound throughout, but the best example is at about the 15-20 second mark (Or the 5 second mark when played at normal speed.)

There are about a million easier ways to produce a generic “dramatic” sound, but this is a fun origin myth, at least.

(via @overthinkingit)