What's the record scratch sound used for freeze frames?
It is a vinyl needle drag — the abrupt scraping stop used to interrupt a scene, almost always followed by a narrator saying some version of "yep, that's me, you're probably wondering how I ended up here". It reads instantly as a narrative interruption without needing any caption.
Hear it
The device is a film convention that short-form video adopted directly. Its usefulness is that it signals a jump in time and point of view simultaneously, in about a second, with no dialogue.
Genuine needle-across-vinyl noise has a broadband texture that synthesised versions never quite reproduce — imitations tend to sound thin, because they model the pitch sweep but not the surface noise underneath it.
Cut to the freeze on the first frame of the scratch, and let the tail run underneath the first second of voiceover rather than trimming it tight.
Commonly called
People search for this under a lot of different names — all of these find it here: