COMM 344: The Sounds Of Doom

Doom's sound style is rooted in two places - heavy music, such as Soundgarden and AC/DC, and the popular Sound Design library of sound effects. Sound Design is notable for it's use in other media, particularly in episodes of Doctor Who and in 1994's The Santa Clause (where enemy death sounds from Doom are used as Reindeer grunts).

But more to the point, we look at Doom's music soundtrack. The primary source (both in the sense of it being the main source of information and a literal primary source) of information on the inspiration for Doom's music is in the music files themselves. The files reference, for instance, AC/DC's Big Gun as an inspiration for E2M1 of doom.wad.

We know this is true of the whole soundtrack because, in 2007, John Romero released Bobby Prince's unused tracks from Doom (doom.wad) and Doom 2 (doom2.wad) with notations as to which albums inspired which unused tracks, and which unused tracks were adapted into other tracks. We also know, from Romero's own admission, that he gave Bobby Prince a stack of metal CDs to work from for Doom's (doom.wad and doom2.wad) soundtrack.

(Author's note: references to doom.wad, doom1.wad, and doom2.wad are made in order to show the usage of a primary source while not being able to upload that source directly due to copyright concerns. All the information found in the WAD files can also be found dissected on The Doom Wiki, but people who cite wikis as sources belong in the setting of Doom's second episode [hell])