[HN Gopher] The Museum of Endangered Sounds
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The Museum of Endangered Sounds
Author : ohjeez
Score : 90 points
Date : 2022-03-30 16:59 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (savethesounds.info)
(TXT) w3m dump (savethesounds.info)
| TuringTest wrote:
| That ZX Spectrum is clearly loading a game splash screen (or
| "loading screen" as we called them).
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rqxz23IxRY
|
| In the old times I could have probably guessed what game it was
| loading by the sound alone, if it was one that I played often!
| killjoywashere wrote:
| Imagine all the automotive engine sounds that need to be
| archived. Looking around my desk: the low hum of a spinning hard
| disk. Mechanical stop watch. The snap of micro USB.
| tablespoon wrote:
| I appreciate the effort, but there's no way stuff like "Space
| Invaders" and "Pac Man" sound effects are endangered. It'll be
| around forever via emulation and IP-value extraction (e.g.
| https://www.amazon.com/Bandai-Namco-Flashback-Blast-Console-...),
| at least until "retro" stops being cool.
|
| Now, the cacophony of a popular video game arcade...
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Yeah, I have multiple sets of some of these sounds in WAV
| format, as do many others. Hard to believe anything about them
| is "endangered"
|
| In fact, why isn't this site providing a downloadable link to
| these files? If he is really interested in preservation, they
| should provide a download link instead of paragraphs of fluff.
|
| Because the really endangered concept here is the notion of
| "files", which anyone publishing anything on the cloud seems to
| want to do away with.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Yeah, I have multiple sets of some of these sounds in WAV
| format, as do many others. Hard to believe anything about
| them is "endangered"
|
| I would say sounds that exist mainly as WAVs on someone's
| computer are properly endangered.
|
| The point I was making is that some of these sounds are from
| things (mainly video games) that will be endlessly (and
| easily) recycled forever, so they aren't actually endangered.
| Others, from formerly ubiquitous but now _utterly_ obsolete
| hardware and software, are truly engendered.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Now, the cacophony of a popular video game arcade..._
|
| What year?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6aNPsjNwFo&list=PL5G6BYUMbQ...
| erwincoumans wrote:
| Where are the Commodore 64 SID chip tunes? Never Ending Story,
| Rambo, Green Beret, Attack of the Mutant Camels. Of course none
| of those sounds are 'endangered', just nostalgia.
| [deleted]
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| No sounds of endangered species? Or lost species?
|
| I get it, the site is mostly about fun and the internet.
|
| But reminds me also of lost things like "the feeling of being in
| the backseat of a 1978 Beetle with no air conditioning as a kid
| on a road trip" and other lost sensations.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Some of these are making a comeback, like vinyl and Nintendo
| cartridges.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| The sounds of the analog telephone system:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f63uCpov5Lc
| r_klancer wrote:
| Was going to make the same suggestion. The Evan Doorbell tapes
| you link to are great for learning about that lost world.
|
| I can remember that when I was a kid, once you started dialing,
| the phone would go silent-- _almost_. What you would actually
| hear was hiss, ghostly clicks now and then, and, occasionally,
| very quietly, down near the noise floor, short bursts of tones
| - beep boop boop beep boop _beep_!
|
| I learned about blueboxes and the like later (in what were
| histories by then) and I know what I was hearing was some kind
| of crosstalk, but I never found out whether the tones were MF
| tones (one telco switch signaling to another to set up the
| call, in the voice band, but just before the phones on either
| end were patched into the circuit) or (similar, but different)
| DTMF tones from modems and fax machines on the local circuit.
| (I vaguely remember occasionally hearing tentative tones like
| from a real person pressing buttons.)
|
| All the electromechanical hacks from the midcentury systems
| that were sometimes still in place in the 80s and even 90s are
| fascinating -- the earliest direct dial systems had to set up
| the connection digit by digit because they had no _memory_.
| Later they invented systems that could remember some of the
| digits by temporarily connecting your circuit to a literal
| mechanical stepper on the telco end that would replay those
| digits to the next switch down the line (and then disconnect)
| once you had dialed enough digits to fill it up.
| pram wrote:
| DTMF was used for in-band signaling. For example pulse calls
| would be encoded into it, and then those tones were relayed.
| Probably why they sounded like a fax machine auto dialing.
| plainjane wrote:
| dvh wrote:
| Voltaire said that in the future the most valuable thing will be
| silence.
| dorchadas wrote:
| That was my first thought when reading this headline: do they
| preserve silence? But he's absolutely right. After light
| pollution, noise pollution is probably the second most ignored
| type of pollution, and quite important imo.
| p1mrx wrote:
| If you turn all the sounds on, the madness-inducing animation
| makes more sense.
| r_klancer wrote:
| My favorite endangered sound is probably too subtle for the
| museum and, alas, one I can no longer hear anyway: the 15625 Hz
| squeal of an NTSC cathode ray tube TV.
|
| I can remember knowing whether the TV had been turned off or was
| just on mute (with no video input) well into the 90s just by the
| sound.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| What age did you stop hearing it?
|
| I assume if we had a future hearing aid that bypassed the
| eardrum and connected to the nerves directly, we could hear
| long lost frequencies again.
| r_klancer wrote:
| I don't know. The last time I regularly used a standard def
| CRT TV was in 2005. Pretty sure I could hear it then at
| 30-ish. Sometime last year I pulled up a Youtube video that
| plays a rising tone up through 20kHz. I stopped being able to
| hear the tone somewhere between 10kHz and 15 kHz. My kids
| could hear it fine.
|
| The sound lives on in my memory. I can vividly remember the
| _squeee_ of turning the TV on. Actually I can hear it right
| now! But I believe that is something called "tinnitus" :)
| jll29 wrote:
| - Commodore 1541 drive music
|
| - Captain Crunch whistle
|
| - Commodore C64 SAM TTS
| tmikaeld wrote:
| Where's that 56k modem? :-(
|
| Thought it looked familiar, 9th time this is posted on HN.
| mparramon wrote:
| It's there, 5th row from the bottom, 3rd column :-)
| evancoop wrote:
| How about the sound of children playing outside? The sound of a
| baseball popping into a well-worn leather mitt still exists, but
| is becoming awfully rare. It ain't tech, but it's a byproduct of
| tech.
| kaybe wrote:
| It's at least as much a byproduct of bad city planning and car-
| centric design, I'd say.
| postalrat wrote:
| I could be wrong but it seems like it reached it's peak
| during and immediately after the construction of those
| cities.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| My personal favourite on obscure electronics sounds:
|
| http://www.w2sjw.com/radio_sounds.html
| mojuba wrote:
| Now that's a museum, thank you!
| zoltar wrote:
| Anyone else miss the sound from old stepper motor hard drives?
| Like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy3uWRuQXl0#t=4m30s
|
| I've been tempted to write something the monitors kernel io stats
| and softly beeps at me, but maybe those days should just stay
| behind us...
| tablespoon wrote:
| Yes, specifically this one:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlHZpgzefoE
|
| I have one that still works, but I'll probably live to regret
| leaving our 68k Mac on 24x7 for like a year in order to get a
| tiny amount of distributed.net RC5-64 hash rate.
| kaylz wrote:
| Insert a dubstep track around any of these and you have a fair
| shot at making it in today's music scene.
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(page generated 2022-04-01 23:01 UTC)