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Ask Slashdot: Sounds We Don't Hear Any More?
J. L. Tympanum writes: While discussing music with my 24-year old son, the Typewriter Song (Leroy Anderson) came up. Within 10 seconds he had it playing on his laptop, but he didn't really get the joke because he had never seen a typewriter, nor heard the characteristics sounds — the clack of the keys, the end-of-line bell, the zip of the carriage return — that the typewriter makes. What other sounds do we not hear any more? More points for the longer they lasted (typewriters were around for over a century).
The sound of a teletype machine. I had a model 15 in my bedroom when I was in High School back in the 60s. It was connected to my shortwave ham radio rig. I used it to converse with other hams around the world. I could also tune in on Reuters news and weather bureau reports. Later, I worked as an Engineer at a radio station. A model 15 was how we got our news from the AP wire.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
chuff-chuff-chuff-chuff!
I always knew that one day I'd no longer be able to know a CRT was in the room from the high-pitched flyback transformer sound, but I always expected it would be because of my own loss of high-frequency hearing. But the CRT pretty much disappeared before that. Length of time: less than the telephone.
we didn't record them when we had the chance.
While they're not completely gone, the click-whir-whir-whir of a rotary phone dial is largely a thing of the past now.
Modem handshakes (fax doesn't count)
Nerrrrr! Squawk! BONG! BONG! BONG! Scrrrrch! Doot!
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
Dial-up connection sound.
Somewhat recent...
...and does not know what a typewriter is?
Thanks to anti-lock brakes and traction control, the sound is getting fairly rare.
And of course the ringing bell of the ubiquitous telephone in homes, offices, and payphones everywhere has now switched to electronic dings and shitty sound bytes.
Shorter span then the typewriter I believe. My dad had one up to the 1960's.
What's the joke about the typewriter song? I'm aware of the song, but I didn't think there was any kind of joke associated with it.
A beeper/pager going off. A pay phone ringing on a sidewalk.
Mankind once knew the sounds of the dodo, the dusky seaside sparrow, and many other now-extinct animals.
We've also lost the sounds of human languages that died before being recorded. The same goes for songs that were neither recorded nor which have written scores.
We've all but lost the sound of the virtuoso castrati male adult singing voice, but given what has to happen to get that voice, this is probably a good thing.
The sound of a spark-gap radio transmission was routinely heard over wireless sets in the first 15-20 years of the last century.
almost all the telcos have stopped leasing the software on their digital voice switches that reads the click=k=k=k=k=k=k=k of the dial. for that matter, you never hear the zzzziiipppppp-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk of rotary contactors that were the CO side of that dial phone (or the clank-k-k-k-THUNK of the crossbar switch.)
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
What the hell is this? This is not news. Just put this crap in the polls, where questions belong.
Welcome to Slashdot by Dice, Inc.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
With almost every TV station broadcasting 24x7, you don't hear these sounds much anymore.
Duration: presumably from the 1940s or 1950s throught at least the 1980s.
Cash registers haven't made the Cha Ching sound in a long time. Yet people still say, "Cha Ching!" when they encounter a monetary windfall. I wonder how many of them don't even realize its onomatopoeic origin.
The sound of a line printer spewing out paper a line at a time. LPD "on fire"
What other sounds do we not hear any more?
The sound of a '74, fresh off the stocks, releasing a simultaneous broadside against some yellow Frenchy Republican bastards.
Sir Mix-A-Lot - Beepers (In Touch Remix): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXRcRaX2N6Q
You may still hear it on work phones or when you visit grandma, but most people will never hear it on a cell phone.
Duration: since late 1800s or early 1900s, but common only since 1950s or 1960s.
The sound of a rotary telephone dial turning back into its its rest position after each number is dialed,
Laying claim to all our copyrights. Rumor has it he was killed by a pack of rabid raccoons back in '06.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Rotary dial telephones
When I first saw the matrix, I was old enough to also know that very distinct sound of modem negotiation as the silver stuff crawled down Neo's throat. I showed that movie to my 11 year old recently and when the sound came my kid sort of said, "huh?"
The high frequency whistle they made. About five years ago my son switched our old CTV TV on and asked me about that sound. I realised that I had lost the ability to hear it just as the CRT became obsolete.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Most lines are welded now, so it doesn't happen any more
That funny sound the videocassette makes when you push it in the VCR, and the tape winds around the drum, and finally it starts playing.
- Mike
I see what you did there...
It's now the EAS, with a new tone, probably containing digital information.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/29230/11-sounds-your-kids-have-probably-never-heard
The scratching sound of a quill pen against paper - done in by the typewriter.
The sound of a hammer and chisel carving Latin into marble tablets - done in by the quill pen and paper.
The squishy sound of a reed stylus forming cuneiform symbols in clay tablets - done in by hammer and chisel.
Don't know if any of them had a song.
My dad used to go to church Saturday to mimeograph the Sunday bulletin. I still remember the smell and sound of that thing.
Rotary phone.
I haven't heard floppy drives for a while. Also, dot matrix printers. And the sound of rotary telephones as you're dialing them. Actually, Mental Floss had an article about this.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
"As he relaxed, he was pierced by the familiar and irritating rattle of some one cranking a Ford: snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah. Himself a pious motorist, Babbitt cranked with the unseen driver, with him waited through taut hours for the roar of the starting engine, with him agonized as the roar ceased and again began the infernal patient snap-ah-ahâ"a round, flat sound, a shivering cold-morning sound, a sound infuriating and inescapable. Not till the rising voice of the motor told him that the Ford was moving was he released from the panting tension."--Sinclair Lewis, "Babbitt"
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
are the calls of some birds that are extinct.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Just asking.
Never heard the sounds a typewriter makes? So, this guy's 24-year old son has like, never seen a movie? ...or last Tuesday's premiere of Marvel's Agent Carter, for that matter.
Also: Who the hell is modding down all the comments about rotary phones and modems and stuff?
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
The very characteristic rattle of a motion picture projector--most familiar from 16 mm projectors in classrooms or 8 mm projectors showing home movies, but also faintly audible in many movie theatres. Probably around 1900 to 1980 or so.
The whine of a reel-to-reel tape recorder rewinding, rising in pitch as the diameter of the remaining tape decrees, followed by the dramatic snapping noise as the end of the tape comes off the reel. 1945 to 1990 maybe.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
clippety clop
- Bells on bicycles.
- Old-fashioned car horns (ah-OO-gah).
- Roller skates, which have metal wheels, rolling on a sidewalk.
- Manual lawn mowers.
- Church bells, unless you live close to a church that plays them.
- When I was growing up, an alarm would sound every day at noon. I don't think it plays now.
- Pogo sticks bouncing. I heven't seen kids playing with pogo sticks for a long time.
I think it got hijacked by Mawell House, but it was a song first.
The distinctive whine of an old SCSI drive. The whir-whir-whir-whir-click of a tape cassette rewinding. The flappity-flappity of a movie reel that has gone through the projector. Cha-chunk of a slide projector. The sound old beer cans used to make when ripped open. Dot-matrix printers. Floppy drives. Floppy drives forced to make "music".
Constellation
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
oddly enough, someone emailed me yesterday asking if it's possible to attach a fax machine to VOIP. And even stranger, it apparently is possible.
Like this.
The Museum of Endangered Sounds has a lot of great examples of this.
The clicking of a rotary phone.
Up until perhaps about the year 2000, almost everything electronic with a speaker that plugged into the wall, except for really good audiophile equipment, had a faint 60 Hz. hum audible during periods of silence in the program material. One easily learned to ignore it, but it was there. (It was very hard to avoid it in phonograph cartridges, for example).
The ubiquity of 60-Hz hum (or 60-cycle hum as it was called then) was the basis of a plot point in Theodore Sturgeon's psychoanalytic SF story, "The Other Man," for example.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Power tools are replacing hand tools pretty completely.
I've only heard it in games (Age of Empires II) and movies. Never in real life.
Lifetime of this sound: human history minus a few centuries.
ASR-33 TTY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
The sound of cold booting an old video game arcade in the '80s and even into the '90s. Old Williams video games made a "bong" sound upon successful POST, and many other games had unique sounds that would fire when they booted. I have very fond memories of being in these arcades when they would flip the breaker, turn all the machines on, and there would be this cacophony of boot sounds (and then many of them would go into their various attract modes at the same time too). I later became a repair technician in a casino, and when booting the slot machines in a similar fashion, I heard that same bong, only to find that Williams (now making slot machines) incorporated that same bong into some of their (now very old) software.
The "whirrr clack-clack-clack-clack whirr clack-clack-clack-clack" of dialing on a rotary phone (although I do have a working one in my home for funsies, so I hear this more than many) is also not heard much anymore.
:crickets:
I recall hearing people popping empty beer cups at County Stadium in Milwaukee, WI while listening to the post-game shows.
When I was 19 there were songs from the Scorpion's Love At First Sting album in the regular hourly or whatever rotation of songs on Top 40 stations then. It's a trip to think about something along the lines of Rock You Like A Hurricane being played there now.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
A space shuttle liftoff
And before that a Saturn V liftoff
When I was a kid this was a pretty standard noise. The things holding the crappy muffler were themselves crappy and between the heat and road salts they simply didn't stand a chance. I am pretty sure that if you stood by a busy downtown road in 1975 that you wouldn't have to wait an hour for a dragging muffler car to go by.
I am not sure that I have heard that sound in a decade or more.
The materials in cars have certainly changed. So I say, the sound of a car door closing.
...saying, "Sorry, we got that one wrong. I apologize to the parents of that young man."
There was that chug chug chug as the motor would either catch or almost catch along with the lurching and spring noises of the car bouncing with each engine turnover. But the whole choreographed event is something that I haven't seen in years. Yet even in the early 80s there were people(often students) who's cars pretty much always needed a push start. They would strategize only parking their cars pointing downhill.
S.O.S. - Morse code broadcasts
Analog RF static (TV) - ghosting
White noise
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
, which not everyone can hear, but the "Bonnnnnng" sound of the degaussing coil and the crackling sound of the high voltage hitting the CRT at startup...
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
pidib pidip pidip pdawww... Or something like that as it wrote each line. And then the paper feed. And sometimes it furiously printing in both directions....
http://everything2.com/title/D...
One on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Hard to explain to my kid that you needed lots of sheets of fanfold paper when you wanted to use "the computer".
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
DUH nuh nuhnuh nuhnuh nuhnuh nuhnuh nuhnuh nuhnuh nuhnuh BATMAN!!
Alas, the distant panpipes of R1/CCITT 5 signalling when a long distance call was made.
Cheetahs, tigers, rhinos... the list goes on.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Anti-lock brakes don't help when someone skids sideways.
At Vegas you don't hear the coins dropping on the slot machines anymore, now you hear beep, boop from the machine's speakers :)
That high pitched gibberish when you rewind a reel to reel tape recorder.
I was going to say, the sound of a needle being dragged across a vinyl record -- it was used as a sound effect long after people no longer knew what it meant -- I remember that some company got flack for using it in a commercial, when people thought it was the sound of a zipper unzipping instead. But I guess with vinyl making a comeback, the sound is becoming mainstream again.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The CHUNK-CHUNK-CHUNK of a keypunch machine. It has a keyboard and each time you type a letter, an oblong hole is punched into a Hollerith card. When I was in elementary school maybe 35 or so years ago I was lucky enough to be able to take weekend classes in Fortran at a giant high school that had a whole room sized system. One card for one line of code, and throw out one if you make a typo. You could write on them. You put a stack of cards into a hopper on the reader machine and then could run the program. I Don't remember if it had a screen.
Anyway, let me tell you that was a VERY satisfying sound that makes a visceral thud through the table and your hands on the keyboard. I miss it.
That school - Allendale HS in New Jersey - had a real planetarium with two-lobed projector too where I learned some basic astronomy. It was a wonderful experience that had big impa ct on me.
This seems to be an emulator!
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist...
http://x3270.bgp.nu/x026.html
This is a test. This station is conducting a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. This is only a test.
Going from one end of the dial to the other of a variable capacitor tuned radio.
I was born in the British Commonwealth
They used to play "God Save the Queen" before the movie at the cinema
miss the sound of my nine needle matrix printer.
The screeching of printing, whizzing of the printer head, the ka-chunk of paper feed.
Don't miss the print results, the time it took or ripping off those hole feeds on the sides of each paper.
Remember all those home movies on Super 8 film? And the smell of the film burning when it got jammed?
The sound of one of the neighbors using a foot-powered sewing machine (not a foot switch - foot powered).
The sound of metal trash cans (too) early in the morning.
The sound of a VHS machine loading or ejecting a tape.
A wind-up clock going tick-tick-tick
Everything associated with an 8-track player.
"Breaker breaker" from the CB craze.
Any campaign promise from an honest politician (or for that matter anything from an honest politician)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Some places where I'm at now still use them and do the 12 noon siren, but a lot of places, including the area I work/use to live, don't have them anymore.
Also, the sound of the credit card imprinting devices. Anyone who worked retail or any position that used them regularly knew the sound.
There is something of a resurgence, but Polaroid camera mechanisms spitting out a photo.
Add in one-use flash bulbs/cubes and electronic film advancement in higher end 35mm film cameras. Heck, even manually lever advancing film in various types of cameras.
I mean a heavy Western Electric Bakelite phone with a corded handset, a dial and a bell. Makes a magnificent clatter that ends with a ding. Nothing quite like it.
Dot Matrix Printers.
Not to mention, PC speaker SFX.
Which were monotone, but could be modulated by messing with the cmos clock. I remember making a .MOD file player for PC speakers...
How about the clip-clop of horse's hooves on cobblestones? Or does it have to be things that became rare in our lifetime?
If the latter I'd go with the sound of a telephone bell. The mechanical ringing bell that was on so many different models of phones.
What do I win?
Little Brother, watching the watchers
What the hell is this? This is not news. Just put this crap in the polls, where questions belong.
While you are technically correct, I happen to think it's one of the more enjoyable threads
on Slashdot in a long time.
There's a lot of unpleasant news which shows up here. One can only take so much
of that sort of reality in a day's time, before despair sets in. So an enjoyable lighthearted
thread is far from the worst that could be on this website, though I certainly agree that
Slashdot these days is a far cry from what it used to be.
What the hell is this? This is not news. Just put this crap in the polls, where questions belong.
t's interesting because we're seeing the mass obsolescence of both old, established devices (and their industries) and new stuff that's obsolete within a few years of its' introduction. With many newer laptops, you don't even get to hear the CD/DVD because there isn't one - they're going the way of floppies.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
TV static (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rVt2b80L-A); Any kind of low-quality recording, e.g. phonographs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOiFt47CsXo); Domesticated animals other than pets, e.g. horses used to be everywhere (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2ey1_UDj_c); Old phone ringing (listening to this now got me so irritated, just like in the old days; https://www.youtube.com/watch?...)
the sound of a dialup modem connecting to the Internet.
Remembering my 150 MB (yes, MB) full height 5 1/4 RLL HDD spin up. It was an old Micropolice drive. The whirr of access and very audible CLUNK as it parked the heads ( which had to be done manually via a command). Ah the nostalgia!
The first time I heard it spin up I though I had connected the power pins incorrectly in the Molex connector, because I stared at it in horror as it sounded like a jet plane about to take off.
Now we have to listen to a lame digital impersonation of one.
(I guess thank goodness there are no mock autowinder sounds.)
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
any kind of bells.
At the NY MOMA exhibit (sadly static) I saw dozens of people explaining to their kids how the boards updated with a clacka-clacka-clacka. I could see the nostlagia in their eyes. For some reason the kids didn't see the connection between this and the airport monitors typically displaying the "Windows has encountered a problem and needs to be restarted" dialogue.
I suspect once (if?) I ever have kids, I doubt that they'll ever come across white noise unless hearing it at school.
Back in the day, you would run into it by simply by changing the TV channel or radio station. Nowadays devices scan for a list of channels, preventing you from running into it, and even if you tuned it manually, modern TVs can detect it and simply block it out.
The clicking as the dial came back to rest...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Stuart Ashen put up a video a while ago showing off an obscure 80s construction toy that came with a cassette tape telling the ridiculawesome Saturday-morning cartoon style backstory of the characters you could build with it.
He realized at one point it was just repeating the same text in the booklet, and fast-forwarded to make sure.
Some fucking kid in the comments asked why he "added that annoying fake fast-forwarding sound." I think I cried a little.
Adding Machines were ubiquitous growing up in offices & flash bulbs in your Kodak Brownie were the norm.
Blank channels on television or FM radio had white noise. With Digital television, no more white noise, and FM radio technology has better "squelch" circuitry.
on a party line.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
lose != loose
The occasional sonic boom from fighters breaking the sound barrier, it has been years since I heard that while I was on land.
Passionately Indifferent
casey kasem top 40....
Check out the version by Jean-Jacques Perrey and Dana Countryman. It's pretty funny.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Typewriter/dp/B009TP17X6
"You're hired!"
How about the clack of the dial on a TV as you change the channel, or the THUNK of an 8 track player as it switches to the next channel?
This space unintentionally left blank.
My daughter is 23 and she knows the sound of a typewriter. Probably from watching old TV shows and movies.
Haven't had that for about a billion years.
If new technology appearing is relevant, so is old technology disappearing.
The ding to advace the film strip projector to the next slide.
... horse shit in a garage.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
For example:
The Windows 95 startup sound - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The ICQ uh-oh sound - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
RIngtones, notification sounds and alarms from old phones that we no longer use. I've found that I can still instantly recognize sounds from handsets that I haven't used in years, even old versions of Android (e.g. the default alarm clock from my Nexus S running Gingerbread).
Removing the pull tab on cans of carbonated beverages. Those new-fangled ones that stay attached just don't sound the same. And I think the HFCS changed the sound too...
And related noises. Decades in use, almost extinct.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
How about the normal analog sounds you'd hear after the needle caught the groove, but before the recorded audio began?
Or the sound of a skipping record, where the same few seconds would repeat over and over? That was especially funny when you'd hear it over the radio for a couple minutes because the DJ had left the booth...
#DeleteChrome
Records may be coming back but record changers are nowhere to be heard.
A while back I was in an old-fashioned ice cream store with my family. I had gotten my cone and was on my way to sit sit down when I heard the sound of our sale being rung up on a mechanical cash register. I hadn't heard that sound in years and the rhythmic chunk-chunk-chunk chunkachunkachunkachunk.... cha-ching! really caught my attention.
Funny. I haven't been back to the ice cream place, and it's closed now. I haven't heard that sound since, and I wonder if I ever will again.
"The door is ajar."
Or car alarms that bark orders at you.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
I don't know which is more musical:
a dialup modem connecting
or
Ada Jones
How many people have actual mechanical-ringer phones any more? I have one specifically for the purpose of being heard anywhere in the house, but don't actually use it to talk.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
When I was growing up in Southern New England I could tell how cold it was by the pitch of the squeak my walking on fresh snow caused. The colder the temp, the higher the "squeeee".
and introducing acoustic guitar
Plus
Tubular Bells
Yep, its been over 40 years since Mike Oldfield released his first album
The sound of each minute flipping by, in the dead of night when you can't sleep.
I had one like this as a kid.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
Used to be a part of every Internet session... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
A real live person (instead of a machine) answering, when I phone any large company.
Venturi rattle on a carburetor. That high pitched whistle when you crank the throttle open full bore and the Intake manifold, being at it's peak vacuum, suddenly has a bloody huge amount of inflow as the outside air pressure rushes in. The one thing standing in the way of nature's abhorrence is a tiny metal circle, and it has a restricted flow to cause a vacuum itself, to draw heavy fuel through a narrow tube to be dumped into the voracious maw of the intake manifold. All this fury causes a high pitch chirp as this little metal ring vibrates on it's mounting slightly. To the trained ear it's a symphony of potential horsepower but now it's only heard if you have a buddy who's a race car driver or mechanic. The average person has fuel injection and they don't depend on physics to deliver fuel to the engine, it's sad really.
We don't hear the cachunk, cachunk, cachunk of the mimeograph machine anymore.
The CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK of an old VHF tuner knob.
The International (Radio) version of the code is still very much with us. Tune your shortwave radio to just above 7.000 MHz with the BFO turned on and you'll hear lots of activity. It's still used by thousands of amateur radio operators. Now, strictly speaking, you won't hear SOS broadcasts because the marine radio service did away with it for commercial use several years ago. 500 KHz, AKA 600 meters, the distress frequency/wavelength is still monitored at times by some of the museum marine stations and some of the museum ships still check in on that calling frequency when there's an operating event.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel"... On my kid's TV a dead channel is blue now.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The 50/60 Hz hum of fluorescent lamps, as the starters are gradually replaced with high frequency transistor ballasts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In a few decades: combustion engines?
http://www.excaliburdatarecove...
Ah, the memories!
...omphaloskepsis often...
Years ago I had the privilege of living in remote Portugal for a number of years. It was bliss. In addition to being able to actually hear birds, I could hear the lizards scrambling on the whitewashed walls outside as they hunted for insects. I could hear owls daily -- one of my favourite sounds. In addition, I could see the sea, smell it if the wind was right, hear the gulls as they toyed with the wind and swirled high above my cottage.
I miss old school telephone sounds, proper car horns, the sounds of a tea kettle...
I want to go back.
The fast paper tape reader "flup flup flup flup" -- inspiring the TECO "Y" (yank) command.
The yudda yudda yudda of the DECtape.
The bzzzzzzzz of the paper tape punch
The ratta ratta ratta chunk zap of the Flexowriter.
Those were the days!
The bells on an ice cream bicycle (cart). I have only even seen an ice cream truck probably once in the last decade. Every summer there is a truck that goes around the neighbourhood ringing a bell and playing music but it's for sharpening lawnmower blades.
how about them? Haven't heard one in awhile with the cell phones and the whats have yous
Unless you work at a hospital, or are a soldier in a war.
We are a people more disconnected from death than any in history.
Here we go. Excuse the formatting. Good Morse Code (I can still send it and receive it). 15.575 with an interruption. Scratchy records Inna godda da vida www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIVe-rZBcm4 Dial Up MODEM handshake Click, click, click of (then) illegally added telephones on the line. Anything related to "shortwave radio". RSA (Radio South Africa) on the SW Theramins (except for replays of "Good Vibrations") A.M. Radio Tunes played on vacuum column tape drives (Dymec 3030). The sound of old 2-cycle lawnmowers. Captain and Tenille (oh, skip it). The spring-induced "echo" of an automobile "reverb" system". "Heathkit". Honesty
Wow... Where to begin?
In addition to the ones already listed -
- Car backfiring
- Car engine dieseling
- Vinyl record 'stuck in the groove'
- Motor drive on a 35 mm SLR
I worked a tech support line that college students would call into the last few years, and sometimes we would forward the line to a cell phone. One of our guys doesn't have voice mail and it has a busy signal if he's already on the call. We've had students ask what the weird buzzing sound was.
Used to hear those now and again.
Have gnu, will travel.
A 10MB spindle on an IBM mainframe
A floppy drive (5.25 or 3.5)
A 5.25" full-size hard drive (the size of two/three full size CD ROM drives)
A ZIP drive also made a distinctive noise
CD disc changers and disc robots
External CD readers/writers
Data tape
Cassette (VCR or audio)
24 pin Dot Matrix Printers (24 pins are still used in banks etc but I grew up with an 8 pin)
The death rattle of the IBM DeathStar series
A computer user reading the OS handbook and looking at the internal circuitry of their device
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
The sound of a cookoo clock, grandfather clock or steeple clocks. Especially the quarterhourly chimes.
Have gnu, will travel.
Chalk on a chalkboard
Ice cream truck music blaring
Mothers yelling "you kids go play outside and don't come back in until dinner time!"
Politicians saying "the buck stops here!" (and meaning it)
Family members arguing/shouting "No, it's your turn to get up and change the channel" while watching THE tv
Newspaper boys riding their bikes and tossing newspapers
Nasty sound of old Chrysler or Dodge car or truck starting (70's)
Tin cans tied to back of car rattling down road
Telephones actually ringing.
Rotary dials.
Hand-cranked telephones, which I've heard in equipment that I restored as an act of technological homage.
Children playing outside in most suburban streets.
Not too long ago. A guy going around cataloging soon to be lost sounds. Funny also this came up in a college class, I am not all too old but in the late 90s still had a typewriter and rotary phone. I imagine for geeks things like modem, hard drives that sounded like they were telegraphing the ny times every time you clicked something. For me, I worked an industrial job 11 years which used 1960s equipment, noise sucks though. Go away computer fans. Screw you blind people complaining about electric cars. I blame gentrification.
the click-clack of abacus beads hitting one another. I imagine this one wins on length of time in use.
Once upon a time, AOL was king.
Casey Kasem
Wolfman Jack
Walter Cronkite
Howard Cosell
Here's even a similar musical reference: Gretchen Am Spinnrade (Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel) by Shubert, written in 1814. https://www.youtube.com/watch?.... The piano accompaniment imitates the sound of a spinning wheel, with the right hand notes rising and falling as the wheel speeds up and slows down, and the thudding pedal in the left hand. It would have been a familiar sound for centuries. But how many people recognize it anymore?
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Finches. From May to August, you used to hear finches in the morning around my place. Now, I never seem to hear them, and I only see a handful every summer.
Based on nothing, I'm going to blame all the EM radiation from cell phones and wifi. Or pollution. Or something. But I wouldn't mind hearing those finches again.
Or it could be the streetlights, which changed from mercury to sodium vapor a while back, so now the city's illuminated with this awful yellow faux daylight at night instead of the silvery mercury lamps. I remember somebody saying they thought it messed up the birds' diurnal cycles or some such. The city used to be so beautiful at night, and now it all looks like the 50 yard line in the Astrodome. Ugly.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Old personal computers of various kinds used to make a cacophony of noises the first few moments a user flipped the switch on.
from crt tv sets
Mostly random stuff.
The plural of "it" is "they".
Good humor truck. Helm's bakery truck with the long drawers loaded with doughnuts, brownies and cookies that would drive up one's street. It was a So. California thing. The guy blew a whistle with a lever-actuated thing like a parking brake. They were *always* nice people. Oh... they're seemingly gone.
http://idle.slashdot.org/story/12/03/22/1326213/the-sounds-of-tech-past
And I found it by accident just now while trying to see if I could find a Telebit modem sound.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Given that the guillotine was last used in France in 1977, and last used there publicly in 1939, it's not a sound that should be at all familiar, yet I suspect most of you can bring the sound to mind—courtesy of innumerable historical dramas and the dedicated efforts of Foley artists.
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
You no longer hear a skipping record as the needle hits a scratch and bounces out of the track. Or pops and clicks from dust. Or the pop of the needle jumping the groove every other second when you've reached the end of the record.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
the clinking of milk bottles in the morning delivery.
Not the melodious version, but the tinny mono piezo one. Gahhh, it was everywhere!
Second, hour beeps. Back when digital watches were gain ground, the manufacturers decided to add a handy beep, beep feature on the hour. It was great. Except at school assembly, when about 300 watches would all beep at roughly the same time, ish.
The sound of a ZIP drive failing to read my important disk is one I'm very happy to never hear again.
Pretty much every horse barn in the world you'll still hear this.
If anybody listens to radio any more - stations are preset, or a "seek" button scans while muted until it locks on one strong enough to listen to. No more twirling a tuning dial hearing the static or hiss between, or trying to identify something just a bit too weak to really listen to but enough to hear. Do shortwave stations (outside ham radio) still exist?
The calls of the passenger pigeon or dodo bird.
The ring of hammers on railroad stakes.
The trumpet of a charging calvary.
The grunt/chant/song of slaves hauling an enormous stone up the side of a pyramid or rowing a viking/roman/greek/etc. warship.
The moans of a person dying of smallpox.
The screams of a person being stretched on the rack.
The sound of Steven Hawking's natural voice.
The calls of the town crier.
The laughter of the royal court.
The elevator bells of the World Trade Center.
The chime of a mechanical gas pump.
Most of these were around longer than the typewriter.
Floppy drives can play music
the ticking of a wristwatch, the tic-tok of a mechanical clock, the sound of static after a TV station signs off at night, that scrambled sound that I can best describe as a "barrage of laser guns" when trying to access Cinemax, and how about total silence (no cars, faint hiss of electric devices, machines) without "getting away from civilization" (i.e. camping)
I think my first hard drive stored something ridiculous like 10 MB. The old ones don't sound like the new ones. Much louder, beefier and slower; they really gave the computer life. I miss the sound of my old Amstrad.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
modem connection sounds
horse and buggy sounds
cranking noises of hand-started cars
records skipping
tv channel 'end of broadcast day' message
ticker tape machine
pagers
mechanical cash register sounds
mimeograph machines
There were two main types: the drum printer and the chain printer. The drum printer was cheaper and therefore much more common. The drum, which contained all the characters in a given font, rotated once for each row printed. An entire row was printed simultaneously; a separate solenoid-driven hammer in each column fired at the right instant to print the desired character in that column. You could easily tell from across the room whether your program had failed to compile or if execution ended with a core (!) dump. The burst pages between jobs had their own highly characteristic sound.
A related sound is that of ripping fanfold line printer paper to separate jobs. Who uses any kind of fanfold paper these days? Or even paper...?
Oh, and let's not forget the sound of the Hollerith (IBM punch card) reader...
Steam engines. I want to hear a steam engine coming into a station, ring their bells, etc. Sure one can hear them at museums.. but it's just not the same.
This is one of the best /. threads in a long, long time.
dash dash _ dash dash dash _ dot dash dot _ dot dot dot _ dot / dash dot dash dot _ dash dash dash _ dash dot dot _ dot
WTF, the kid never saw video from before 1980? My youngest, when she was in high school over five years ago, asked if we could find an old typewriter for her.
Between the electric cars and bicycles, internal combustion motor sounds are becoming rare, and I happen to appreciate a well-tuned exhaust (think 1969 Camaro 350 or Z/28).
These go back more than a century, so they need to be preserved.
Or do I overshare?
You don't hear those much any more. I remember as teen being able to pick out the combination of the very specific alternator whine and the engine noise my towns police cars made. I could "hear" them coming even at regular speed well over an entire block away. I could pick out out an 80's UPS truck from blocks away.
Tree branches ringing against each other like crystal bells after an ice storm. Once every 1 or 2 years in Northern New Jersey we would have an ice storm. It would completely coat trees in a thick layer if solid ice. The next day the world would be utterly silent, save for the tinkling and chiming of branches as unsern breezes would bang them against each other. For that matter, simply walking unplowed snowy streets with hardly anyone around, snow crunching underfoot is very rare to me. But I think due to global warming perhaps we don't get ice storms that crystallize the tree branches, or the 3 feet of snow I remember.
Yep
One of the best sounds to never hear.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
The sound of chalk on a blackboard, and the sound of erasers being whacked together to get the chalk dust out. Not that most people will miss the awful squeek of chalk writing on the board just right- or is that just wrong?
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
ca-thunk ca-thunk ca-thunk.. Until it jammed.
I have a comment about what we DO still hear.
Ever get put on hold? And then listen to some crappy, worn-out cassette play the same hold music over and over again? Distorted, cutting out, breaking up, and otherwise making the hold experience even more grueling that it otherwise would be?
Ever hear that hold music interrupted with, "YOUR CALL IS VERY IMPORTANT TO US. PLEASE CONTINUE TO HOLD. THE NEXT AVAILABLE OPERATOR WILL BE WITH YOU SHORTLY", and think - mistakenly, not listening carefully by then - that some human had picked up?
Why, in this age of digital music, are we still listening to the same song over and over and over, and why is it still so horribly disfigured??!! Why, in this age of hyper-critical Customer Relations Management, is that hold music still periodically interrupted by false hopes?
This is what we engineers call an "opportunity".
Reach the end of a roll of film and it auto-rewinds with distinctive hum.
From a travelogue I wrote in 2003:
As the light started to dim and elephant to disperse, I heard a familiar hum. The film has reached its end and was now returning to the start. I felt a sense of completeness. Previously, I had toyed with the idea of visiting one of Bangkok's inevitably overtouristed sites. But that now seemed wrong. A rushed viewing of an overcrowded temple in a polluted city was not a fitting close for an epic Asian adventure. Better to stop here, at the last frame of the roll. To end with elephants.
It was the last photo that camera ever took. Digital cameras today emulate some of the noises of film: film advance, mirror clack (even for those that have no mirrors), but not rewind.
Actually rewind sounds of all kinds have mostly disappeared. Reel to Reel, audio cassette, VCR tape. Backup tape rewind still happens but not many hear it anymore.
The sound of flint knapping. And someone already mentioned animal calls.
I will leave this right here http://savethesounds.info/
Honestly, when i bought my 6310i i changed the default ringtone in two days. Not because i disliked it, but because i reached for my phone every 5 minutes in the city.....
For those of you who want to see the typewriter song video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The time lady!
Program Intellivision!
The sound of the Concord on full thrust ascending out of Heathrow over Newbury. High enough to be hardly visible but loud as hell. We loved it, awesome (literally), inspiring.
Not around as long as the typewriter but 27 years was a good run.
Pink Floyd's 'Money' only make sense to the older crowd.
We don't hear the groan of slaves hauling giant blocks of stone across wettened sand. Or depending on your pet theory, the roll of blocks of stone against rolling logs or the whine of flying saucers tractor-beaming those blocks into place.
In the sixties you could recognize the brand of a car just by the sound the engine made ( In Europe at least)
24 years old and never heard typewriters ?
Never watched 'All the president's men' or any old movie with scenes in an office ?
May be you could buy him a load of good old movies, he'll discover some of the best things in american culture.
The sound of an old rotating ditto machine. And the associated smell. ohhh. that smell...
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Sounds I don't hear any more: anything above 10kHz.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The original IBM PC had an electromechanical thingamagig of some sort (possibly for interfacing with the cassette?). A few very early DOS game makers abused this by turning it on and off quickly, thus making a noise that passed for a motorboat or similar, depending on the game.
I'm sick and tired of these hip, "ironic" sigs. This is an actual, honest-to-goodness no-nonsense sig!
The sound of Tyrannosaurus Rex trying to eat my family will never leave my mind. Wait, I must really be dating myself here.
Table-ized A.I.
In old newsreels (1930's) and old time radio, the announcer's voices were either stentorian and over the top (news) or ultra smooth (radio hosts).
In the 1970's the UHF stations would have the most horribly produced local ads ... "I'M CRAZY HENRY HAVING A BLOW OUT SALE! COME ON DOWN BEFORE THEY TAKE ME AWAYYYYY!!!"
I'm sick and tired of these hip, "ironic" sigs. This is an actual, honest-to-goodness no-nonsense sig!
And interval signals. Morse code beacons. Ionospheric crackling and howling.
There was one radio station in the 80s in southern Germany that I've never figured out what it was. I think it was above 108 MHz, beyond the scale of modern FM radios, only old radios could get it. It was a long high sine tone interspersed with downward-upward cadences, probably inspired by a dodecaphonic composition because I remember recognizing the cadences in a piece of music. The cadences were from a small repertoire but their order and interval length seemed irregular, so there could have been something encoded in them.
With emulators, you don't hear the loading tones anymore
With emulators, you don't hear the loading tones anymore
Skeet skeet skeet
Mostly replaced by hydraulics now.
Metal roller skate wheels.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
It's been a while since I heard the susurrus of the watch on my barber's wrist as he gives me a straight shave.
Then again, that's simply because i haven't been there in a while.
It's nice to have a local pocket of stagnant time. A resort.
The Heterodyning when tuning across an AM radio spectrum.
the slurp of of a 3.5mm floppy drive staring up
The bouncy new guy just kept asking the same dumb questions in different ways. I said he sounded like a stuck record. "You what?" Quothe he - too young to have ever heard a record stick.
http://youtu.be/ABrKlQVNuPE.
I'm drinking coffee right now that I just brewed in my percolator.
Telling the factory men (and the whole town) that it was time to go home.
The beep sound on the record telling you to advance the filmstrip to the next frame.
Michael J.
Root, God, what is difference?
Instead of white icon lights and a chime, some pedestrian crossings used to have mechanical clappers. Clap slow to wait, clap fast to cross.
On a hot summer night when all windows were open (because we had no AC) you could hear those damn clappers clapping from all over the city.
Before refrigerators, we had an ice box. Under the ice box was a drip pan to catch the melt water.
All night long. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Few people have working wind-up clocks in their houses any more. At least. It working day in day out. The sounds of ticking clocks at night was soothing.
Also soothing was the sound of the cuckoo clock cuckoopint on the hour.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct_language
With today's battery technology and motor efficiencies the growl of the miniature fuel powered engines used in the scale airplanes and race cars of yesteryear is a sound most of our children would not recognize. Having to heat up the cylinder with a glow plug before spinning the propeller, mixed with avoiding getting whacked by the propeller when it starts, is only history.
The first few seconds of a VHS tape where the sound has gone wonky.
I used to work in a cubical farm where everyone's phone sounded the same. When one phone would sound off, everyone would run back to their seat to see if it was their phone. I solved the problem for me by picking up an old rotary phone at a second-hand store and hooking it up. Not only would I know when it was my phone that was ringing, I would know when my phone was ringing when I was outside the room and down the hall... as did everyone else. :-) ...
Old Telephone Ringer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Old Vintage Rotary Phone Dialing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
...you insensitive clod!
Until somewhere in the nineties here in the Netherlands we had a country wide paging system that use an audible signal at the edge of fm band- most fm radio receivers could receive it. It was a short repeating pattern of tones, it sometimes would have a variation- that would mean a message was sent to one of the pagers. The system was called semafoon, and was operated by the telephone company. If I remember correctly, originally the system was all analog, later there would be short bursts of what sounded like noise in between the signal, that actually contained digital data. I have been looking for recordings of the signal, but i havent been able to find it so far.
Never saw a clip of the bomb going off that included the sound.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
About a decade ago, my Dad discovered that my Grandpa was paying $5 a month to have service for the old black rotary on the wall. It was much cheaper over the long haul to just buy a replacement touch tone model.
A blacksmith at work.
A horse in the street.
A propeller plane.
Two stroke petrol engines.
Steam engines and whistles.
This is not the sig you're looking for.
Not heard that since the 60's.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Every once in a while you could hear the Air Raid Siren Test In San Diego, even 5 miles away. It's been long removed. Almost sounded like this but was more of a single blast test. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Another sound I haven't heard since the 60's are the sonic booms from Miramar NAS.
The sound the ZX Spectrum played when loading your game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbumzCdw4Ts
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
...and how about a polaroid?
Playing with the little metal media guard 'door' on the 3.5inch floppy disc, letting it snick closed after opening it with a finger.
Was a unique and distinctive sound.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
The older mechanical ones. Often found at supermarkets, for example.
Cap guns. Baseball cards in bicycle spokes. The crack, as opposed to the ding, of the bat in baseball games.
Hasn't heard anything that sounds like "no" in years.
Too soon?
Yeah, I think AC is the way to post this one.
When planes were grounded for Sept. 11th, I went out hiking in the largest natural area around (to get away from road noise) and heard something I'd never heard my entire life, the closest I'd come was underground caving.
I currently hear the whine of LED lights, hum of fans, the fridge, a plane, road noise, not counting neighbors' direct noises (car doors, thankfully not too many pets, and the like).
The various sounds that film cameras made, from the genuine click of a mechanical shutter, to the whirr of an automatic film advance/rewind, and even the high-pitch whine of the flash circuitry charging up.
Bonus: others have already mentioned floppy drives, but I'm going to go more specific and say Apple II floppy drives, especially when you first turn on the machine. Kids today and in the future will almost certainly never get to experience that glorious start-up chattering sound.
whirrrrr
hmmm
cluck
schritz schritz schritz schritz
click-pop
Now that the BSR linear drive is on the fritz even I don't hear it anymore
Friend's 14 year-old was over;
ever seen one? "yes, we have one in drama class"
what do you play? "It doesn't work - it's just a prop"
with touch tone dialing and cell phone use, you never hear the clicking of a rotary dial telephone anymore.
Millions of voices crying out in terror from Alderaan.
tick-tock, roughly 1000 years
Ong-ong-ong-ong
You can't handle the truth.
My uncle's 1950 GMC pickup had a very distinctive sucking sound from the air cleaner as the pedal was pushed towards the floorboards (and yes, this truck had floorboards).
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
The sound of a percolator coffee pot.
And yet it's still used in movies (animated anyway) to indicate the "uh oh wtf" sound. Even when it makes no sense for it to exist.
> What the hell is this? This is not news.
Correct. It's "Ask Slashdot," which has never been about news. It's a human interest feature.
There used to be an air raid siren on Jackson Drive just north of Fletcher Parkway, taken down late 70's. Could hear it almost 8 miles away.
BarbaraHudson what's this about you ac stalking/harassing/libeling http://slashdot.org/comments.p... that you ate your words for? Downmod this we see it anyhow (most here browse below -1) so trying to hide it = effete & ineffectual.
Up until the invention of sound recording devices, the only way to hear music was when it was performed by live musicians. Which meant that you would sometimes hear the sounds associated with them warming up or tuning instruments. Admittedly, this isn't entirely gone, but how many people out there do you think have never heard that because they exclusively listen to recorded and produced tracks?
Long have I been fascinated by the sheer power of a nuclear detonation; after seeing the terrible wonders in Trinity and Beyond, I've long held a guilty wish to witness one of those go off, even if just a little one. Alas it was not to be.
I know I know, be careful what I wish for...
when I was little, my parents had wash tub and wringer for doing laundry that they still used occasionally for small jobs even after buying washing machine and dryer later. That was used in conjunction with the folding clothes drying rack. You'd think a variation on that would become popular again for people on budget or not having space/hookups for washing machine/dryer in apartment, it saves money over going to laundromat though takes elbow grease and time
These have all been replaced by high-speed laser printers.
Roland TB-303
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
I miss that warm vintage sound.
I recently went to renew a company license plate. The insurance for it is handled as part of the bulk yearly insurance package for the company as a whole so this certificate was dated as 'started' a few months ago. The secretary of state denied the renewal saying if the certificate of insurance was dated more than 6 weeks ago they needed a new one, due to a new rule to help stop fraud. The current laws, which the current certificate lists in a large notice about it being illegal to provide a false or canceled certificate must not be enough. However if my insurance company faxed them a copy they'd be fine.
I called my agent and one was faxed over in a few minutes. The fax was accepted and I was given a renewal sticker. The fax was the exact same piece of paper, same date, as the piece of paper I had handed to them. They didn't verify the caller ID, call the insurance agent directly, they just picked it up off their fax machine and accepted it. I guess the state guideline writers never assumed that someone other than a legit company would actually own a fax.
Silence isn't heard any longer, either - every inch of every doctor's office, store, anywhere has some TV blaring ads.
Pink Floyd's "Time" starts with a variety of time-related sounds; the tick-tock is still well known, even though modern clocks and watches are electronic, but I don't think many kids today ever heard a mechanical clock alarm sound.
In the early days of car alarms, that little 'symphony' of:
dee-doo-dee-doo, whooop-whooop, beep-beep-beep-beep-beep, etc.
http://www.freesound.org/peopl...
Also, actual physical bells and chimes for things like churches, ice-cream trucks.
Seems like now they just play recordings of bells over speakers.
"We value you as a customer. Thank you for your business."
Oh, I still hear those *words* today. But the sound of those words with the tone of voice that communicates some trustworthy genuine honesty? That would be another story entirely.
He had to ask what that was when the 8-track changed channels :) I didn't mention what TYPE of mix tape we were listening to.
How about the sound of changing the radio tuner? So many are now digital/autoscan.
The really satisfying *snick* sound (and smell!) of pulling Polaroid film out of the camera.
The whine of old analog police sirens.
TV theme songs that were actual songs with singalong vocals.
The "buff buff buff" of a shoe shine.
The tinkling of coins in a street pay phone.
tada.wav
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
The scratching sound of a quill pen against paper - done in by the typewriter
The modern fountain pen came into general use about the same time as the typewriter.
It was only after three key inventions were in place that the fountain pen became a widely popular writing instrument. Those were the iridium-tipped gold nib, hard rubber, and free-flowing ink.
The first fountain pens making use of all these key ingredients appeared in the 1850s. In the 1870s Duncan MacKinnon, a Canadian living in New York City, and Alonzo T. Cross of Providence, Rhode Island, created stylographic pens with a hollow, tubular nib and a wire acting as a valve. Stylographic pens are now used mostly for drafting and technical drawing but were very popular in the decade beginning in 1875. In the 1880s the era of the mass-produced fountain pen finally began. The dominant American producers in this pioneer era were Waterman, of New York City, and Wirt, based in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. Waterman soon outstripped Wirt, along with many companies that sprang up to fill the new and growing fountain pen market. Waterman remained the market leader until the early 1920s.
Fountain pen
Elegant or practical, the fountain pen is a survivor.
the loading of 12" mag tapes onto the drives, the door vooooooshing up, tapes turning and the thwump thwump as the vacuum columns took up the slack..
I miss the shhh-shhh-shhh-shhh sound of the old display boards at airports, before monitors took over. The sound of an updating board sounded like a lot of decks of cards being shuffled at the same time - but cards made of plastic no paper. And the boards only updated one line at a time, so it used to take some time to update an entire display.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
The sound of ZX Spectrum programs loading from cassette tape is something I haven't heard for a while...
Those of you who haven't watched any ponography before the 1980s might have well missed a true marvel of human culture: Scripted (and if from a foreign country lip-synchronized) dialoges in porno movies.
Back then, before "home video" became technically feasible and inexpensive, pornographic movies just like any other movie required expensive equipment/setup/production. So naturally, significant effort was also invested to script their soundtracks and dialoges. Much unlike today, where "porno" means nothing but primitive, barely edited shots of people having intercourse, where the soundtracks is nothing much beyond moans plus sometimes irrelevant background music.
I recently found an analog (sound-)tape from the 1970s with excerpts of pornographic movies (obviously cut together as an advertisement), and it was absolutely hilarious to listen to it. The actors where speaking texts so well written that you could be sure they didn't spontaneously invent them during intercourse. And they were sooo politically incorrect at the same time :-)
the *whirr whirr* sound of a CD in a Playstation One console.
http://www.thegoonshow.net/scr...
Most TVs now don't have static sound when there is no signal. Csssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Though it's intended more for fire trucks than police cars, Federal Signal is still making the Q siren, and yes, those things are LOUD.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Radios and TVs don't put out static anymore, they all mute when tuned to a vacant spot on the dial.
Also, with all-digital tuners, no one hears the sweeping whistle of a heterodyne radio being tuned anymore. I remember that sound fondly as I tuned in distant shortwave stations on a tube Hammarlund receiver. Not that there's anything worth listening to on the shortwave bands anymore, either.
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
They were around for a long time to alert the attendants that a customer had entered the pump area and needed full service.
Btw: no idea why this posts as Anonymous Coward... please pardon my ignorance
Bob Morley, St. Louis
Didn't hear that for years....
Going back to the old rotary-dial phone days... How about that "awahhhawwwahhhawwwahhhaww" weird sound that you got when you dialed a nonsensical number? It sounded like an old lady's voice... probably recorded onto a tape loop, because if you listened to it for a few seconds, it abruptly started again, and kept repeating for a while. If my memory serves, if you stayed on the line listening to the weird thing for too long, it cut off, and was replaced by a very LOUD "busy-signal" type sound.
Willie...
The first practical TV remote was the Zenith Space Command, which worked by whacking resonant bars, and the TV would pick up the sound. The thing vibrated in your hand, and as kids we swore we could hear them, even if technically ultrasonic.
"It if was easy to do, we'd find someone cheaper than you to do it."
Good old matrix printers.
Turntables beginning and finishing "silence" parts sound very distinctive, especially on well used equipment and well used disc.
The yell of, "I'll get it!!" when the phone rang.
I laughed aloud during MIB3 (a rare event indeed) when one of the gizmos they were using made that exact modem connection sound. Everyone in the theater was probably too young to get it.
I couldn't decide if they just used the sound bite as a stock sound and they didn't really know what it was, or if it was sort of an inside joke about that particular piece of fictional technology being a POS or something :)
Just heard one the other day and I was confused for a momnet.
The sound of a Saturn V ripping and rending it's way into space.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
I'm pretty sure that the city of Windcrest, Texas (a San Antonio suburb) still does their siren test every Monday at noon.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
"Please" and "Thank you"? *
So very 2006
Or as the kids call it, "snow".
And by kids I mean old people.
...of relays opening and closing on circuit-switched PBXes. When I worked at Olivetti back in the early 80s, we had a PBX with something like 200 extensions. Walking into the telecom room during business hours was a cacophony to behold.
cogito ergo zoom
I think, therefore I go fast
When I worked at Hawker Siddeley in 1968-69 the Elliot 4130 we used had mag tape storage (no discs) and if you set it to find something on a tape it would sometimes make noises like baroque music from the console speaker. I think speakers like this date back almost to Von Neumann and Flowers in the 1940s. The last I heard was an IBM 360/50 in the mid 70s. So at least 30 years.
When I was growing up, I lived on or near Air Force bases, as dad was a pilot. Pilots in training took their planes supersonic at least twice a week. The sonic booms would rattle the windows. Since then they have tightened up the regulations "boom rides" are only done far away from inhabited areas, if at all.
Ironic that the guy who noticed this is named Tympanum, which means ear drum.
Circa 1990, I had a 486 DX PC running DOS with two floppy drives: the standard 3.5", and the older 5.25". This was during the transition from the larger and lower density 5.25" to the more modern "High Density" 1.44MB disks. The BIOS would check to see if there was a disk in each drive in their initialization order: first "A:", the 3.5"; then "B:", the 5.25". We had a 180 MB HDD, so we didn't ordinarily boot up the computer to a boot disk except for recovery or for specific legacy software that required it; instead you'd boot DOS from the HDD, then insert a disk to install the software to the HDD, or (for older programs) run them directly off the disk.
Anyway, the disk drives were almost comical in the audible noise they made when the BIOS asked them to determine if there was a disk inserted. I distinctly remember that the sound of the two drives was in harmony, like music: two "BOOOOO-doop!" noises, one about two octaves higher than the other, in sequence, each lasting about 1.5 seconds, with a 0.5 second pause in between.
I was 5 at the time, but that was my intro to computers. It was the first PC our family owned.
I hadn't heard that Pythagorean example before. It really is surprising. Here's another math example that may surprise people:
Imagine that the Earth is a perfect sphere, and a rope is laid all the way around the Earth at the equator. The rope would be approximately 24,900 miles long. Now imagine that the rope is to be lifted exactly 1 foot off the ground all the way around. How much longer would the rope need to be?
Answer: A bit more than 6 feet. (2 to be exact).
How about the clickety-whir of a rotary dial telephone? I used to surprise people by being able to dial phone numbers using the hang-up button instead of the dial. If pressed rapidly enough, a series of 9 hang-up clicks had the same effect as dialling a "9", 8 clicks dialled an "8", and so on.
This trick continued to work long after tone dialling became the norm. For all I know it still works today; it's been a long time since I tried it.
Where I live, mornings used to be a cacophony of birdsong. After decades of "development", there's not much birdsong to be heard anymore aside from the occasional annoyance of a squawking crow.
I haven't read the entire thread, but nobody hears the sound of a modem negotiating with a remote device. I remember what a hot-snot I thought I was when I finally upgraded my 2400 baud to 9600, and I could suddenly hit all of those BBS's faster than greased lightning.
A good Public Spanking
A deep voiced announcer on TV asking: "It's ten o'clock. Do you know where your children are?"
Maybe it's time to bring that one back.
There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
Anyone here besides me old enough to remember 300 baud modem connect tones, back before they got scratchy and they were just two simple tones, at originate and answer frequencies?
That tone was generated rather than recorded, and it was strictly a Bell System thing (though not all RBOCs used it). Each tone generator sounded slightly different.
You can find a sample on this page (look for "No Such Number Tone").
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Car backfire
I remember the "we-or" sound made by radios when you tried to find tune them. This was specially pronounced with old tube radios and analog dials on shortwave rigs.
As well as the other camera sounds mentioned, there was the whine of the flash capacitor charging, which started high-pitched and quickly went up above audible. My best memory of that was being on the lighting crew of a stage production and accidentally holding the camera next to my headset microphone when the flash started charging - and the subsequent "Augh, don't do that!" in my ear. Not quite sure why (though I could guess), but the microphone picked up the whine so much more than you would normally.
It is kind of sad that my kids probably won't ever use (and therefore understand) film - or any kind of tape for that matter (except the sticky kind).
The slamming of a wooden screen door as you ran outside to play with your friends...........Ready or not....here I come.......
A quern is a hand-powered grindstone. Practically every house in the world - well, the world grinding grain to make bread or porrage/ pottage/ gruel - used one from the dawn of seed gathering (centuries to millennia before the dawn of agriculture) until about the start of the industrial revolution. Say, between 10 and 20 thousand years.
They only went out of use when it really became cheaper and easier to take your grain to the mill to get it ground by wind/ water/ horse power instead of indulging in (literally) "the daily grind".
If you want a million or two years more of duration, then you could go for the sound of stone on stone, making a new stone tool. More latterly, depending on region, antler on stone, but that's probably only a few tens of thousands of years.
Oh, you wnat something technological?
How about the "pop" of a gas light lighting within it's mantle? These days you probably won't even hear it on a camp site - just the click of an LED switching on/off - but for a century or so it represented the chemical industry, the first large-scale "to the door" distribution network (home many optical fibres still run in trenches originally cut for gas pipes?) ; the billing that went with it, needing computers (human ones, then adding machines, then typewriters).
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Atari 800 disk drive I/O beeping through the monitor speaker while it loaded programs. The "shucka-shucka-shucka" sound of Apple ][ disk drives booting.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
The weird ticking of a tube driven TV warming up, or cooling off after it is turned off.
The odd creepy voice and tones of WWV. (yes I know it still exists, but who listens to it to set their clocks anymore?)
High speed paper tape punch.
Keypunch terminal.
Electromechanical adding machine.... chek.chek.chek.chek....chek.chek.-kathunk-whirrrr.
Idle sound of an IBM Selectric.
Speech warning module from a Nissan 200SX. It used a tiny stack of records on a common shaft, each with it's own double sided stylus assembly. "Dink! The Door is Ajar...Dink! The Door is Ajar...Dink! The Door is Ajar..." (No it is NOT.. it is a DOOR!)
The rather tuneful sound of a Macintosh 400K floppy disk drive due its CLV motor drive.
Dolby-C calibration tones on the leader of prosumer tape editions of albums such as Dark Side of the Moon.
The odd fluttery sound of 16mm film audio when the playback loop collapses.
Credit Card Slip Imprinter.
CPU bus cycles of a 1MHz 6502 leaking through the front end of an AM radio.
CB radio bleed-through on TV channel 4 or 5 audio.
The eery duck squawk of CB-SSB transmissions.
Air Raid siren tests in south bay area every few weeks. Sometimes the system would glitch and there would just be a 1/2 second "Blurp!" that floated over the crickets, and frogs in middle of the night.
The heavy mechanical thunk of a VHF channel selector from a Tube TV.
The howls of frustration when the power goes out in a large game arcade.
The mixed electronic and electromechanical cacophony of power coming back on in a large game arcade after a power outage.
An electromechanical jukebox changing records.
A mechanical cigarette machine dispensing a pack.
As important as it was at one point in my life, I can't recall the sound now.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Horse carriage. Been around for at least a pair of millenia ...
With the near ubiquity of voicemail, when was the last time you heard one?
When I was growing up in Southern New England I could tell how cold it was by the pitch of the squeak my walking on fresh snow caused. The colder the temp, the higher the "squeeee".
I grew up in South Carolina, where it snows one year out of four and it's wet and sloppy when it does. And shuts down the whole city.
When I got out of school I got a job in Vermont. (Where's Vermont?)
That winter I went out one morning after the first snow, and when I stepped down it Sqeeked! I just froze and stood there, trying to figure out what it was. When I took another step it was obvious. But it was quite a shock! 8-)
Even the "designer" models now have fake chimes and an electronic synthesizer with a speaker.
The sound is not even close.
A pox on web designers who feel that window.innerWidth == screen.availWidth
also good old line printers like the IBM 1403 that did over 1000 lpm...kind of like working near a heavy machine gun.
We so short sighted thinking it's all about us or the things we make:
How about the call of a Passeger Pigeon (for example):
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
You no longer hear the 'burring' sound as the dial returns to rest after dialing a single digit.
No particular order...
The scratch of a phonograph record when it's left on after finishing the record.
The sound of an analogue modem connecting.
The sound of a telegraph. I love old westerns just to hear this sound.
The sound of a manual typewriter.
The sound of an electric IBM "ball" typewriter. We have a typewriter at work for those rare instances our Compliance department has to fill out a paper form. It's a daisy wheel and just doesn't sound quite right to me.
The sound of a TV sign off at the end of the broadcast day.
Tap shoes. Lots of entertainment these days, but I haven't seen tap dancing on TV since the 1960s.
The roar of a rotary airplane engine. You know, something like a B-29 revving up, circa World War II. I love hearing that sound in old movies.
The ring of hammer on steel over an anvil. There are still blacksmiths around, but they are rare. My grandfather had a huge anvil in his workshop. When I was a kid, I used to hammer on it for hours just to hear the ring of that sound. It was like a bell.
The sound of a sonic boom.
The sound of an honest Republican.
The sound of an 8-track clicking to the next track in the middle of a song.
The very memory makes me duck for cover... or at least ear plugs.
place I used to work had one of those things in the data center room with two layers of cubical walls around it just so people could shout and be understood at normal data center bellowing levels over the hvac and machine fans
Money
Cash register noises
Nobody's heard any nuclear bombs in a while...
...from the warp engines.
Also that nasal "Ahhperator" intonation that used to be standard when you dialed 0. Not to mention the tones and faint noises you could hear on the line when switches were analog.