Museum of Endangered Sounds preserves obsolete tech noises

Do you miss the pleading bleeps of the Tamagotchi? Or the sound of a telephone rotary dial? You can now listen to these and other vintage tech noises at the Museum of Endangered Sounds.

A character called Brendan Chilcutt has created the online "museum" in early 2012 to preserve the sounds made famous by his favourite old devices, such as the "textured rattle and hum of a VHS tape being sucked into the womb of a 1983 JVC HR-7100 VCR" (ah, yes). As new products come to market, these nostalgia-inducing noises become as obsolete as the devices that make them.

Chilcutt is actually an online persona created by three graduate students keen to break into the advertising industry ---

Phil Hadad, Marybeth Ledesma and Greg Elwood. Hadad told Wired.co.uk that the idea had been brewing for a while, but there were definitely a few "Aha!" moments. "For instance, a while back I was sitting in the backseat of a car with two other friends. They were both texting or checking emails. One of them was using a Blackberry and one was on an iPhone. Although I could hear the typing of keys on the Blackberry, the iPhone didn't make a sound.

That for sure got me thinking of where we're headed and what we've lost. Today an iPhone comes loaded with a sound library based on sounds that future generations will never have had direct experience with."

The Museum of Endangered Sounds currently features a rather limited collection, including the white noise of a cathode ray tube TV, the old Nokia ringtone immortalised by Trigger Happy TV and the strained buzzing of a floppy disk drive.

Chilcutt says that he has a "ten-year plan", in which he will complete the data collection by 2015 and then spend seven years developing the "proper markup language to reinterpret the sounds as a binary composition".

He says on his site: "Imagine a world where we never again hear the symphonic startup of a Windows 95 machine. Imagine generations of children unacquainted with the chattering of angels lodged deep within the recesses of an old cathode ray tube TV. And when the entire world has adopted devices with sleek, silent touch interfaces, where will we turn for the sound of fingers striking qwerty keypads? Tell me that. And tell me: who will play my Game Boy when I'm gone?"

Hadad told Wired.co.uk that the team plans to develop and experience that "packages the sounds and lets people have even more control over their interaction with them. Maybe make them downloadable or string them into new listening experiences."

He added: "It's so easy now to get caught up in an attempt to keep up with new technology. As soon as new gadgets or even new versions of old gadgets are introduced people line up to buy them.

And plenty of us think that obtaining these gadgets will make us whole, or happier, or that we won't be able to go on without them. "But for us, when we hear something like the old dial-up modem, or the sound of a pay phone, it takes us back to a time when our lives were simpler. And we realized we were pretty happy. Or it looks that way now. Maybe it's the struggle to live in the moment that has caused us to fall so utterly in love with these dying sounds, but we feel they're worth preserving."

Update 15:20 30/05/2012: The Museum of Endangered Sounds site seems to be down at the moment. It's likely to be getting hammered by a lot of traffic. Sit tight and try again later.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK