[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by richlevy

Don't look at me. I'm still having a hard time describing that sound at the beginning of "Law & Order".

It's called "doink doink", although Mike Post (who invented it) calls it "The Ching".

http://blog.rickbreslin.com/blog/law...oink_sound.asp

Post: (When coming up with the idea of themes for the show, Dick Wolf) said no, this is about the slickness and sort of just the -- it's got to have something streety about it and sophisticated at the same time. Okay, well, the streetyness is obvious in the guitar and the sophistication, okay, so I did go back and listen to Rhapsody in Blue and I go, I can use a clarinet and I can do that, too. Gershwin doesn't have a copyright on the clarinet. So I put those two elements together and tried to design a piece of music that would speak both to the cop half of the show and the lawyer half of the show.... It had to not be complex, but it had to have something that took you on a little bit of a journey in the middle section to speak to the unraveling of the case in terms of the law. Those are the kinds of things he said to me, and I came out with this thing that's worked real well in these years. And the other thing we discussed in that was he said I need a sound that goes along with these cards that are going to identify our location.

Kitt: The chunk, chunk sound.
Post: Right. And those could happen every 2 minutes, every 4 minutes, it's going to happen a lot in the show. So I went and sampled -- I found a sample of a jail door closing, and I put it with a couple of little other sounds, and made this ching-ching thing.

Kitt: What's the official name of that sound?
Post: The ching.