No sound, once made, is ever truly lost,” Ray Bradbury once observed. The Museum of Endangered Sounds, or MOES, is seeing to that. Established online almost six years ago, the museum is an audio archive of 33 signature, iconic sounds that have mostly outlived their identifying technology. Among those faded sounds are the tap dance of typewriter keys, the screech of a dial-up modem, and the anticipatory beep linked to a projected movie countdown.
“Imagine a world where we never again hear the symphonic startup of a Windows 95 machine,” writes professed MOES founder Brendan Chilcutt on the museum's Web site. “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? And tell me: Who will play my GameBoy when I’m gone?”
Chilcutt, actually, is the geekish nom de plume for Marybeth Ledesma, Phil Hadad, and Greg Elwood, who created the museum as graduate students in an advertising program at Virginia Commonwealth University. Inspiration for the museum was born in a restaurant-bound car in which Ledesma took out her Blackberry to send a text. “My friends had iPhones and they could hear me texting,” the now-29 year-old told Vanity Fair. “It became this ongoing joke about how I was so old school. We started to make a list of [technology] we remembered as children and the sounds associated with different devices. And that led to ‘Let’s put this online right now.’ I don’t know why we had that urgency. No one was asking us to.”
Marcel Proust was referring to smells and tastes, but he could have easily added sounds to the list when he wrote, “After the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone remain . . . poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting . . .” Whether you’re a millennial or a baby boomer, clicking through MOES’s audio exhibits, which include the chattering of a dot-matrix printer, Speak & Spell’s robotic instructions, an “at-the-tone” time operator, can bring out one’s inner geezer. Ledesma waxes nostalgic about her family’s first Internet connection the way boomers recall their families’ first color television set. “I was five or six years-old,” she said. “It was a big deal.”
For the most part, the devices themselves don’t exactly elicit a “you don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone” feeling. Take the VCR: replaced by the sleeker and sharper DVD, videocassettes are a relic on par with floppy discs, and good riddance. So why does the whirring sound of a VHS tape rewinding evoke a wistfulness that can make one forget the rage that came when said VCR chewed up a week’s worth of cached All My Children episodes?
“Imagine a world where we never again hear the symphonic startup of a Windows 95 machine,” writes professed MOES founder Brendan Chilcutt on the museum's Web site. “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? And tell me: Who will play my GameBoy when I’m gone?”
Chilcutt, actually, is the geekish nom de plume for Marybeth Ledesma, Phil Hadad, and Greg Elwood, who created the museum as graduate students in an advertising program at Virginia Commonwealth University. Inspiration for the museum was born in a restaurant-bound car in which Ledesma took out her Blackberry to send a text. “My friends had iPhones and they could hear me texting,” the now-29 year-old told Vanity Fair. “It became this ongoing joke about how I was so old school. We started to make a list of [technology] we remembered as children and the sounds associated with different devices. And that led to ‘Let’s put this online right now.’ I don’t know why we had that urgency. No one was asking us to.”Marcel Proust was referring to smells and tastes, but he could have easily added sounds to the list when he wrote, “After the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone remain . . . poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting . . .” Whether you’re a millennial or a baby boomer, clicking through MOES’s audio exhibits, which include the chattering of a dot-matrix printer, Speak & Spell’s robotic instructions, an “at-the-tone” time operator, can bring out one’s inner geezer. Ledesma waxes nostalgic about her family’s first Internet connection the way boomers recall their families’ first color television set. “I was five or six years-old,” she said. “It was a big deal.”
For the most part, the devices themselves don’t exactly elicit a “you don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone” feeling. Take the VCR: replaced by the sleeker and sharper DVD, videocassettes are a relic on par with floppy discs, and good riddance. So why does the whirring sound of a VHS tape rewinding evoke a wistfulness that can make one forget the rage that came when said VCR chewed up a week’s worth of cached All My Children episodes?
by Donald Liebenson, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Image: Museum of Endangered Sounds
