Whoosh / Impact Cue
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The percussive punctuation of trailers: whooshes — fast swelling transitional sweeps — and impacts — the deep, distorted boom hits that land on cuts, reveals and logo cards. These are sound-design elements as much as musical ones, engineered from processed metal, reversed reverb, sub-bass and layered noise to feel physical on a cinema system. Deployed with braams and risers, whooshes carry the ear across an edit while impacts nail the moment of arrival. Their function is kinetic and structural, marking the rhythm of the montage rather than carrying melody.
History
Whooshes and impacts migrated from film sound design into trailer scoring as fast-cut montages demanded audible connective hits, and by the late 2000s they were a standardised layer of every big campaign. Hybrid houses Hi-Finesse and Ninja Tracks, epic libraries Two Steps from Hell, Audiomachine and Really Slow Motion, and sample developers like Boom Library built and sold vast banks of these elements. Alongside the braam and the riser, the whoosh-impact pair defined the sound-design-forward aesthetic of 2010s trailers and remains core promo grammar.
Defining artists
Essential listening
- Strength of a Thousand Men(2010) — Two Steps from HellSpotifyYouTube
- Protectors of the Earth(2010) — Two Steps from HellSpotifyYouTube
- Redshift(2012) — AudiomachineSpotifyYouTube
- Nemesis — Really Slow MotionSpotifyYouTube
- Mind Heist(2010) — Zack HemseySpotifyYouTube
- Suns and Stars — Really Slow MotionSpotifyYouTube
Sources
- Film Music Magazine on trailer sound design
- Sound on Sound features on cinematic sound design
- Mervyn Cooke, A History of Film Music (2008)