Hollywood's Favourite Bird Call
By Dan Gardner | March 6, 2024
Most people who watch a lot of Hollywood films never notice the craft that has been working away in their ears the whole time and never once appears on screen: sound design. Today's subject is one of its most durable all-purpose building blocks — the call of a loon.
Once you know about it, you'll almost certainly catch it in the next Hollywood movie you watch, and then in the one after that, and the one after that.
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One Call, Everywhere on Earth
The sound comes from the common loon (Gavia immer), a waterbird that lives on the lakes of North America. Its long call carries a long way, rises as it goes, and has a tremble on the tail of it.
Hollywood treats that call as an emotional shortcut: whenever a scene needs "remote," "empty," or "something here is wrong," the mixer lays it into the background. On a lake at night, that's fair enough. But it also gets used in deserts, in jungles, and on alien planets. The loon's call reaches places the loon itself has never been.
This isn't purely laziness. It's a shortcut that has been proven over and over: the audience hears it and the mood is instantly in place, without spending a single line of dialogue.
Birdwatchers Have Objections
To bird enthusiasts and ornithologists, this is one of the most grating errors of basic fact in the movies. The loon gets placed at latitudes where it could not possibly occur; worse, the bird visible on screen is plainly a different species, and the sound laid over it is a loon's. One shortcut in the sound reveals a general indifference to natural detail.
Where Loons Actually Live
The common loon lives mainly on lakes across Canada and the northern United States, and moves to coastal waters in winter. It is an excellent diver, able to go quite deep in pursuit of fish, and it has a few signature moves — the "penguin dance," in which it rears up and treads rapidly on the water's surface with both feet, and its long running take-off, skimming along the water for some distance.
In a sentence: this is a northern bird, a lake bird, a cold-weather bird. Deserts and jungles have nothing to do with it.
Why the Human Ear Hears Grief in It
It comes down to pitch.
In an ordinary melody, the notes land one at a time, on defined degrees of the scale. The ear is accustomed to hearing major as bright and settled, and minor as dim and sorrowful.
The loon's long call lands on neither side. Its pitch slides continuously, travelling from somewhere near "major" all the way toward "minor" without pausing anywhere along the route. To the ear, it is a note that never comes to rest — the moment you start to judge whether it is bright or dark, it has already slid away.
If you want a more familiar reference point, the huayin (滑音, portamento) of the erhu works the same way. The note isn't jumped to; it is kneaded and dragged there, and the desolate quality comes precisely from that stretch "on the way," not from the note at the end. The loon obviously isn't imitating any instrument, but it triggers the same instinct in the human ear.
That's what Hollywood is really buying: a physiological unease that works without requiring any cultural background at all.
Overused, and Also Seen
There's another side worth mentioning. Precisely because this call has been used so heavily, the common loon is one of the few wild waterbirds that has any name recognition at all. Its real situation is not an easy one: water pollution, disturbance from human activity, and climate change are all squeezing its habitat. A sound the movies have misplaced for decades has, in return, won the actual bird a little attention.
The explanatory framework in this article comes from a video produced by VOX.
Related Reading
- What Is a Peetime — what a Peetime is
- Which Movies Have the Hardest Peetimes to Find? — another behind-the-scenes piece