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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
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 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.
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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
My dad used to go to church Saturday to mimeograph the Sunday bulletin. I still remember the smell and sound of that thing.
"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!
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!
Good riddance to CRTs. I always hated that sound. Every so often when I go to an office that has an old TV running, ugh. That sound always drove me nuts.
When composite-input TVs came out my dad would leave the TV on with the cable box and VCR off and I'd ask him why the TV is still on. He'd say "it's not on." It most definitely was and that annoying whine was driving me batty.
I used to take apart my TVs to put baffling in to cancel out that sound. I am 43 now and I can still hear past 17.5KHz. Why? Because it was drilled into me by my mom to not blast my ears with headphones, and when using power tools I use hearing protection. I have an even greater appreciation for my hearing now because once I got a sinus infection so bad it spread to both ears and I had 95%+ hearing loss for more than three months when my inner and middle ears filled with fluid, and there was so much pressure it perforated my eardrums, so I'm even more strict about hearing protection having experienced near-total deafness for an extended period. Since then certain frequencies cause some pain due to reverberation because those frequencies seem to be amplified to me - it may be due to scar tissue where my ear drums perforated or something, I don't know and haven't bothered to find out.
But flyback transformer whine? Ugh. Same with PC power supplies that are going bad - they have a very similar high pitch whine. When I go to my old office to maintain the servers for my partners, I need to stay out of the lobby because the power supply whines like mad. No one else in the office can hear it.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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."
File under genre "ambient horror": Dial-up modem slowed down
I could listen to this all day. And probably will.
The clicking as the dial came back to rest...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I'm using a CRT monitor right now, a 21" IBM P275 with a Trinitron tube. 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. Haven't noticed flyback whine for years but that's probably down to my age. LCD is still inferior to CRT in many ways and you have to wonder what CRTs we would have today if development had continued. LCD has also taken a step backwards recently with the introduction of LED backlights, they make for thinner panels and lower power consumption but uniformity of many recent panels is really poor.
Having said that, my CRT will probably have to go this year, most probably late in the spring when the heat the thing generates is no longer welcome. My desk is also sagging from the weight of it sitting there for nine years.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
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.
Nerrrrr! Squawk! BONG! BONG! BONG! Scrrrrch! Doot!
I ran a BBS and loved those sounds the negotiation, hand shake, and the connect; meant someone was logging in, One's entire purpose of running a BBS.
After 8 lines I did have to silence them.
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...
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.
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.
Yah, I worked at an ISP back then and it when customers would complain that they were getting a slow connection, I'd have them hold the phone up to the modem speaker and try to connect so I could hear it and determine the connection speed and protocol. The BONG! mentioned above pegs it as a 56k modem string :) v.90 i believe.
"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"
At work we once had a bank of modems, and to check which modem went to which phone number (people sometimes switched them without telling us) we would have to call the number on a voice phone across the way and then run over to the modem bank to see which lights were on. Often the modem lights wouldn't stay on long enough from a mere phone call.
Rather than run fast and risky in a crowded, wiry data center, I discovered that if I whistled certain frequencies mirroring the connect sound, the modem would think I was another modem and spend a longer time trying to connect. Thus, by learning to speak modemese, I could walk instead of run.
A computer room steward saw me doing this and told his shift buddies about "the crazy lonely guy who flirts with modems". Referring to their squawky sound, somebody joked about modems being consolation partners after I allegedly got dumped by a Dalek. Good Times!
Table-ized A.I.
When civilization collapses, everyone who has a typewriter will be looked on with awe and envy.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question