This Digital Museum Is Preserving Endangered Sounds, Like the Dial-Up Modem and AIM Notifications
The past looked different — but it sounded different, too. I don’t mean Duran Duran or the Flashdance soundtrack. I mean the sounds of the technology we used to use, or rely on.
Do you remember, for instance, the sound of a pre-digital movie projector “counting down”? How about the incredible cacophony of a dial-up internet connection in progress? Or the crude beeps of Space Invaders? Or the maddening “It’s not my fault” vocal message that Macs used to blurt when something wasn’t working?
Happily, these nostalgia-making audio bites, and more, are cataloged on a site called the Museum of Endangered Sounds. Think of it as a hearable box of old Polaroid pictures, revealing eras we’d just about forgotten.
The site was built by a young man named Brendan Chilcutt, who explains the project as a long-term effort to “preserve the sounds made famous by my favorite old technologies and electronics equipment.” There are a few dozen examples on the site so far, and they are smartly chosen — from games to analog cameras to audio technology to phones (mobile and otherwise).
As if to prove the point that these old sounds matter, some of them are arguably becoming less endangered. The sound of a vinyl record is part of the archive, for instance — and vinyl is hotter than it’s been in decades. Typewriters are also oddly trendy again. And how many times have you heard some stranger’s smartphone emitting the sound of — a classic no-frills analog phone ring?
That said, there are plenty of aural gems here that I doubt we’ll ever hear in the wild again. The days of the “time lady,” for instance, are likely behind us. And maybe it’s just as well that it’s been forever since the last time I heard the sound chosen to represent the pay phone: “We’re sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed from the phone you are using.”
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