Drone of Dread

- "What we want is to create a powerful sense of dread."
- *DUUUUUURRRRRRRRRN*

- "See? The longer the note, the more dread."

—Super Hans, Peep Show

Note: this is a Music trope. If you were looking for bees, check out Gosh Hornet, Everything's Worse with Bees and Bee-Bee Gun.

In music, a drone is a sustained, continuous sound, note or tone-cluster. Music based around drones will emphasize minimalism and texture, timbre, eventually harmony, with less concern over rhythm and melody.

Because the atmosphere created by this kind of music tends to be extremely creepy and unsettling, it is a close cousin of the Psycho Strings, and the two often overlaps, but are just as often very distinct: the original psycho strings, for instance, are not drony at all, and many drones do not use strings, rather relying on low played brass instruments, or weird apparatuses and machines to produce their sounds.

Drone based music can delve into Nightmare Fuel particularly efficiently if it uses what is called "infrasound," which simply put, is sound pitched so low that it's just barely above the human threshold of hearing it as an individual tone. Studies have been conducted showing that this ultra low pitched sound, while almost undetectable to people, has a strange ability to cause nervousness, and even physical discomfort, despite the listener not even being aware of hearing it. there's even some speculation that local harmonic resonance in certain areas is responsible for people perceiving those locations as being haunted.

Frequently used in Horror stories (particularly Psychological Horror ones), but can show up in other genres as well (generally as a way to highligh that, whatever the appearances are, something very wrong/unusual is going on under the fragile surface of reality).

Not to be confused with the similarly named part of a bagpipe (which however does produce a droning sound), an Attack Drone, or a male honey bee (even though the musical element, the instrument part and the robot are all named after the animal, which in turn is named after the onomatopoeia for the sound it makes). Note that old-fashioned bagpipes and the like do rely heavily on the more contemplative drone in place of a bass section. Also compare with Hell Is That Noise, which is usually even more atonal.

Examples of Drone of Dread include:

Advertising

• The Worldwide Reveal Trailer for Modern Warfare 3 overlaid scenes of Monumental Damage with a chilling, rhythmic, atonal blast reminiscent of a siren, only a couple registers lower and slower. As the film progressed, it was combined in chorus with the tone used for the Emergency Alert System in the United States.

Anime and Manga

• Mononoke: When the Kabuki Sounds are replaced by low droning brass instruments, you know something creepy is about to happen.

Film

• 2001: A Space Odyssey: Whenever the Monolith is involved, drony contemporary classical music composed by György Ligeti (see below) is heard.
• Alien
• Antichrist: With the exception of Händel's "Lascia ch'io pianga", used in the prologue and conclusion, the soundtrack consists entirely of drones.
• In The Dark Knight, the Joker's Leitmotif is a dissonant droning sound.
• The Shining
• The use of a crescendo-going ominous drone in the very first seconds of There Will Be Blood quickly established the strange nature of the movie.
• The ominous drones denoting the presence of evil spirits in the first Evil Dead film.
• The theme for the Emperor becomes very creepy due to the droning chorus.
• Peter Gabriel's soundtrack for "The Last Temptation Of Christ" had a lot of this. Peter even Lampshaded it in an interview at the time, saying that his rule of thumb while composing the soundtrack was "When in doubt, Drone."
• Repeated drones were used in the trailer for Revenge of The Fallen.
• Used very effectively throughout Inception to solidify the "wrongness" of the dream worlds.
• Used repeatedly in the German film Das Experiment (The Experiment).
• This short film.

Live Action TV

• For some reason, TCM (Turner Classic Movies) has seen fit to accompany the rating cards before each movie they show with one. The effect is unintentionally unnerving.
• The end music of each episode of The Shadow Line is the siren drone of doom, but high pitched instead of low. It's singularly disturbing.

Music

• György Ligeti's compositions spanned a large array of different styles, but some of them featured really prominent drones, notably the pieces Requiem and Atmospheres (both heard in 2001: A Space Odyssey). The former combines drones with Ominous Latin Chanting, and the latter features the largest cluster chord ever written, with every note in the chromatic scale over a range of five octaves being played at once — that's 60 different notes.
• L'Étoile du Matin Noir, an EP of dark ambient and noise music featuring many drones, released for free under Creative Commons.
• Most of Sixteen Horsepower's output is ominous to begin with, but when David Eugene Edwards breaks out his Chemnitzer concertina or hurdy-gurdy, the ominousness gets cranked up to 11.
  • Ditto Woven Hand, Edwards' followup music project. He frequently plays drones underneath the main melody, to make these already-menacing songs even more so.
• Calibretto's "American Psycho" uses a sustained organ drone for an effective Last-Note Nightmare.
• The entirety of drone metal.
  • Especially Sunn O))), the trope codifiers of drone doom, whose music is horror incarnate. link.
• John Cale tends to carry this with him wherever he goes.
• Some ambient music is based around sounds like this.
  • In particular the dark ambient artist Lustmord, who uses the aforementioned infrasound in his music to incredibly unsettling degree.
• "You Can't Cool Off In The Mill Pond You Can Only Die" by John Fahey (not Blind Joe Death) adds throat singing for more drone.
• Xera's "Inda" starts off with a rather creepy, minute-long drone performed on a rabel.
• Norwegian duo Röyksopp have this hidden track on their album 'Senior':
• Klaus Schulze - Wahnfried 1883.
• Bull of Heaven.
• Some of Autechre's ambient works, such as "Paralel Suns", which sounds like Silent Hill ambience, "Perlence Suns", and "Perlence Subrange 6-36".
• Robert Fripp and Jeff Fayman's 2000 collaboration A Temple in the Clouds uses "Frippertronic" guitar drones. link
• Both albums by Dilate.
• "Modern Ruin Part 2", the Hidden Track on Covenant's Modern Ruin album (only on the CD, not the digital release). Reminiscent of the forementioned Quake soundtrack, as well as the nightmare hospital ambience in Silent Hill. Likewise for "Cryotank Expansion" from their first album.
• Juno Reactor's one-track album Luciana, and to some extent "Solaris" from Shango.
• Jack Dangers' album Music for Planetarium.
• Some Throbbing Gristle material, such as "Slug Bait" and the legendary "Hamburger Lady".
• Most ambient pieces by Greg Davis.

Theatre

• The last of the six Sea Interludes in Britten's opera Peter Grimes (and the only one not available in a concert version), "Fog", sustains one fifthless dominant seventh chord quietly for several minutes under various orchestral laments and outbursts.

Video Games

• Heard in multiple locations in Blood.
• Quake has a soundtrack featuring many creepy drones, composed by Trent Reznor.
• Fallout Epically with the songs composed by Mark Morgan chiefly in City of the Dead
• This is the entire basis of the award-winning sound design in the Silent Hill series. When there isn't all that scraping crashing metal or absolute silence, there's usually low drones of things along the lines of, for example, deepened breathing sounds on the streets of the fog town in the original game.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
• Used for macabre effect during the first couple of blocks of Eldritch Location Tartarus in Persona 3, since you're venturing into the unknown in a place crawling with metaphysical manifestations of the human psyche. The effect goes away as you climb more floors and more and more instruments are added to the piece, and by the time you reach block 6 it's a complete composition.
• Pokémon Yellow's version of Missingno causes the battle music to become dead static. Not quite a drone, but close and creepy as hell.
• The opening menu music for Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne.
• In The Legend of Zelda Majoras Mask, the final boss theme features an eerie droning tune in the background.
  • The Day 3 Clock Town theme also has ominous low tones, which makes the cheerful melody from Days 1 and 2 sound pretty darn creepy.
  • The Fire Temple (v 1.0) music from The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time combines this with Ominous Arabic Chanting, somewhat reminiscent of the aforementioned "Requiem" from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
• Yasunori Mitsuda's soundtrack for Xenogears has two of these: "The One Who Is Torn Apart" and "Omen". There's also "Jaws of Ice" which mainly focuses on two slowly-alternating tritone drone notes for a particularly unsettling effect.
• Several pieces in Halo 2, eg the first and last parts of "Sacred Icon Suite", use choral drones. The first game has "Suite Autumn"(even creepier in the remake), the middle of "Truth & Reconciliation Suite", which also uses Psycho Strings, "Lament for Pvt. Jenkins", and parts of "Library Suite". Also, the first half of "Nightfall" in Halo: Reach.
  • Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary has several ambiences that turn this trope Up to Eleven, such as Unfortunate Discovery, which was originally What Once Was Lost; and Bad Dream (originally Trace Amounts).
• The Resident Evil games like to use this, e.g. "The Second Floor", "Wandering Alone", and "The Underground Laboratory" in Resident Evil 2, "Feel The Tense" and "Never Give Up The Escape" from the third installment, and "Deathtrap", "Lost in Darkness, "Narrow and Close, "Rush of Fear" and "Rush of Horror" from the Resident Evil 1 remake. Resident Evil 4, while more actionized, still has a plethora of scary drone pieces, especially Ruined Village, Noche(heard when first encountering a Plaga), Bitores Mendez(combined with Psycho Strings), Cold Sweat(combined with Heartbeat Soundtrack), and Novistadors.
• Most of the ambience in Twisted Metal: Black fits this trope, but Snowy Fields is the epitome of terrifying drone.
• Pressure Road from Ys II.
• The World 4 background music from Super Mario Galaxy 2.
  • Also, the meteorites Mario/Luigi uses to fight Bowser.
• The Big Boo's Haunt theme from Super Mario 64.
• Amongst the Dead from Medal of Honor: Underground uses this alongside Psycho Strings, Ethereal Choir, and For Doom the Bell Tolls. Also, Passage to Iraklion.
• The Airbase ambience in Syphon Filter 2.
  • The Aljir prison music was even better.
• Several of the background songs from Yume Nikki, like the appropriately named "Hellish Hum".
• Mass Effect 3 gives the Reapers a chilling BWWOOOAAARRMM when they arrive. It's part of the soundtrack too.
• An unintentional example due to Idiot Programming is the Level 3 music in "Lollipops" from Action 52. Listening to it in a ROM utility is scary enough, but that's nothing compared to how it sounds in-game (skip to 3:17).
• A staple of the F.E.A.R. soundtracks: Insertion, Initiation, She's Afraid of You, Bad Water, Turret Massacre(barely audible, but still hellishly creepy), Premonition, Distorted Realities, et al.
• The first level of Ecco the Dolphin use creepy sitar-like drones, which adds to the desolate feeling.
• The Mars Underground and Shield Generator ambient sounds in The Journeyman Project have this effect, and to a lesser extent the background hum in the TSA.
• In P.N.03, the Final Boss's scorpion form uses this.

Western Animation

• This trope is part of the appeal of The Hypnotoad from Futurama. Interestingly, it was originally just a placeholder sound until they found something better, but they decided it was just so wrong sounding that they had to keep it. According to David Cohen, the name for that particular sound effect in the editing machine is "Angry Machine."