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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.
Nerrrrr! Squawk! BONG! BONG! BONG! Scrrrrch! Doot!
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
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.
...and does not know what a typewriter is?
He knows what a typewriter is, he just doesn't know what they sounded like.
My company had one used by the shipping department, to fill out forms. It was retired in 1994, 21 years ago. We had a company BBQ planned for the following Friday, so someone brought a sledgehammer, and we took turns bashing it to pieces.
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
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.
Rotary telephone dialing I meant.
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!
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
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".
Like this.
The space shuttle and concorde are extinct birds. You sure won't hear them anymore.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The Museum of Endangered Sounds has a lot of great examples of this.
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!
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
, 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.
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."
That reminds me, I don't think I've heard the sound of curb feelers since the 70's or so.
Probably because before we in the U.S. drove big-ass boats that you sit high in, we used to drive big-ass boats that you sat lower in.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"I would confuse it by having it try to divide zero by zero, that thing would run for hours trying to figure out the answer."
I think that there are medicines to treat that these days.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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).
it was 991-xxxx where xxxx was the last 4 digits of the number, at least in my area. Pick up phone, dial, blip the line and listen for steady tone, then hang up. The phone would start ringing..
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.
and introducing acoustic guitar
Plus
Tubular Bells
Yep, its been over 40 years since Mike Oldfield released his first album
The occasional sonic boom from fighters breaking the sound barrier, it has been years since I heard that while I was on land.
Lived near an Air Base a lot of time, never know when one was coming. I think it was the SST that had the sonic boom stopped, they didn't want it booming every time it flew over and it took nation wise.
Many years ago I did hear a sonic boom in a remote area and surprised, but more so when a cop pulled, drew his gun on me ordering me out of the car, he had thought I was shooting a gun. Apparently he had never hard one before.
The CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK of an old VHF tuner knob.
"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.
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Watching a blacksmith -- or a glass blower -- work is worthwhile, just for the artistry.
And if you're willing to special-case the smithwork, the Japanese government has been deliberately working to preserve the swordsmithing skills.
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...
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.
You're kidding, right?
Maybe not - probably you're just too young to know.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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.
In Australia from the mide sixties onward we had phones with a pair of identical steel bells. They worked but sounded pretty plain. Before that we had phones with a thick and a thin *brass* bell each tuned to a specific pitch. Sounded way way WAY better.
Sounds I don't hear any more: anything above 10kHz.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
When civilization collapses, everyone who has a typewriter will be looked on with awe and envy.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
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.
They would strategize only parking their cars pointing downhill.
I was lucky to be parked on a small hill last summer when my battery suddenly died. Got it started, and took care to park on hills until I got to the hardware store to get a new one :)
With a well maintained engine you can engage the clutch in first gear at less than walking speed and have it start easily.
In Norway stick shifts are very common, to the point that almost all new models still have the option, at least in the low to middle price ranges. Even expensive, non-performance cars are usually available with manual transmission. My next car will certainly be a stick shift.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
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."