Where have I heard the wind in Tomb Raider before?
I remember hearing an odd sound in the wind at certain points in Tomb Raider, as if the wind was blowing over broken glass pipes, as if someone was running a wetted finger along the rim of a wineglass. It sounded almost like stringed instruments playing a single keening note, but very faintly. It was off somehow, unresolved, eerie. It didn’t belong. It might have even been a music cue. So much of Tomb Raider’s music is subtle.
And what I most remember about that sound is that I’d heard it before. It was from some other movie or game. Where did I hear that? I couldn’t figure it out. Until today.
After the jump, mystery solved
Rubber, Quentin Dupieux’s subversively absurd horror movie, opens with people in the desert watching for the movie to start, and you can faintly hear that “finger on a wineglass” keen. Then one of them see a location that sets the movie’s events into motion. As the credits play over scenes of the location — a dump littered with detritus, a bit like the island in Tomb Raider on a smaller and more mundane scale — the sound builds up to the title card, which then leads to the main character lifting himself up out of the dirt.
That’s the sound I heard at some point playing Tomb Raider. I’m almost certain that just as Crystal Dynamics is a fan of The Descent, someone over there working on the sound design is a fan of Rubber.