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Ask Slashdot: Sounds We Don't Hear Any More?

Posted by Soulskill on from the satisfying-click-of-the-turbo-button dept.

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).

11 of 790 comments (clear)

  1. Steam Engines by McGruber · · Score: 4, Informative

    chuff-chuff-chuff-chuff!

  2. Re:Sorta related... the teletype machine by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Informative

    It has been a long time since I have answered the phone, and heard the tone from a misdialed fax machine. Fax machines aren't completely dead, but they are far less common than they used to be. I think only lawyers are bureaucrats still use them.

  3. TV sign-on and sign-off by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Related - the clack of wheels on the tracks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    I think he was referring to the chuff of the piston valves. You're thinking of clickity-clack.

    Hey, McGruber! The Cumbres & Toltec is waiting for you. Ball's in your court...

  5. about fax by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:about fax by petermgreen · · Score: 3, Informative

      Theres also providers who will provide you with a fax number that forwards to email.

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    2. Re: about fax by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      It's surprising because VoIP can do a lot of things to make it not work, and indeed the most reliable way (if supported) to use a fax machine over a VoIP system is to use the protocol developed just for that purpose: T.38. If the fax machine instead uses the audio channel to encode the fax, then the VoIP system cannot use a compressing codec, and latency, jitter and packet loss must all be close to optimal for a successful transmission.

      On the topic of sounds we no longer hear: modem synchronization, the sound of trains rolling on rails with gaps, the rumble, static and pops from vinyl records, the screeching emitted by dot matrix printers, the charging whine of photoflashes, the whirr and track-to-track clacks from floppy disk drives, chalk on blackboard. Good riddance, I say. The world is too loud anyway.

  6. Museum of Endangered Sounds by Aphadon · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Museum of Endangered Sounds has a lot of great examples of this.

  7. Re:Related - the clack of wheels on the tracks by Mashiki · · Score: 5, Informative

    Guess you don't live in a cold part of the world in the winter, or where it can hit 35C+ in the summer. Around here in Canada, we use 30-50m segments that aren't welded because the tracks shrink and expand so much. Once the temps drop to -20C here, you can lose over an 3cm, and once it gets over 35C with the train's on them they can expand over 10cm causing them to warp off the bed.

    So if I walk outside, the next time a train goes by I can hear it hit every clack clearly. Since it's around -20C right now, I can hear it inside my house about 300m away if I pay attention.

    --
    Om, nomnomnom...
  8. Re:Ask Slashdot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  9. Re:The whine of the flyback transformer by thegarbz · · Score: 5, Informative

    Right now I'm enjoying near perfect color reproduction, blacks that are actually black, zero input lag, no ghosting, nothing that resembles backlight bleed and no stuck/dead pixels.

    I'm experiencing the same except for the wider colour gamut, better contrast ratio, and far sharper picture that comes from spending more than $50 on a modern LCD.

    CRTs haven't outperformed common LCDs for about 5-10 years, and even in the early days if you actually bought a proper LCD like an NEC Spectraview you ended up with something that no CRT could match. Go shopping somewhere other than Wallmart when your CRT finally dies and you'll hate yourself for having lived with that garbage so long. Check out some high-end offerings from all those same companies that produced high-end CRTs for colour critical applications back in the day like Eizo, or NEC, (they are still in the business and they are also the source for panels used in medical imaging etc if you like colour accuracy) and don't base your view of technology on what you somewhat throws at you during Black Friday sales.

    I had a high end trinitron screen as well. It was a great screen back in the day but I don't miss it.