You know the musical sting, you've heard it innumerable times, and it instantly conveys mystery and suspense, and often a revelation. We write it “dun, dun duuun,” but this is what is sounds like.
We all recognize it, and we know what it means. It's been used so many times that it's now more likely to be employed as parody than as a serious signature. But how old is it, and who thought it up in the first place? A recording of a radio show in 1912 already used it as parody, so it probably existed in live shows before audio recordings were invented.
It's not always exactly the same. A variation of it was used in the viral dramatic chipmunk video. But the definitive version comes from composer Dick Walter, who named it "Shock/Horror A." You play it with D#, C and F#. So even though we cannot go back far enough to ascertain who first used it, we can look through how it has been used in the past 100 years. It's a fascinating story told at the Guardian. -via Boing Boing