A few weekends ago I was visiting my parents when I thought to look for one of the 1970s-era telephones they had in storage. I had recently realized that my kids had never heard the sound of a real ringing telephone and I thought that was a shame. Modern phones all come with electronic ringers, which pale in comparison to the urgency that a bell provides. The closest they could get to hearing the sound of a ringing bell is a ringtone on an iPhone. I found the old phone I was looking for and made it ring a few times for the kids’ sake (and ok, for mine too). What a contrast it provided to today’s phones.
I began to think about those familiar, everyday sounds that we may no longer hear every day. A real telephone bell. A doorbell that’s actually a bell. A static-filled AM radio station. The sound of a coffee percolator. The sound of a pop-up toaster. The sound of a record skipping. An eight-track tape shifting tracks. The sound of a steam whistle, or a steam engine churning in the distance. A slide projector changing slides. The power winder on a film camera. The sound of a modem as it synced up. The magical dots and dashes of Morse code.
There are so many sounds in my memory. As a middle-schooler I distinctly remember the sound of the mimeograph machine as it churned out blue-tinted copies of papers. I will always remember the sound of my father’s footsteps when I was a kid as he walked by my bedroom early in the morning on his way to work. Sounds trigger memories and emotions, and each of us has these sounds embedded within us.
I would love one day to start a sound museum where those sounds of the past could be experienced again. I’m not talking about using sound samples, but creating the sound using the original instruments to the greatest extent possible. It would be an interesting place, a sonic walk down memory lane, and it would be interesting to see how certain sounds affect some but not others.
What kind of everyday sounds do you miss hearing?
Fighter jets. Growing up on USAF bases, fighter jets taking off and landing were a constant background soundtrack to my childhood. The sound of a old wood frame screen door slamming shut, although I guess that one is still findable today. The sound of a two-way cassette player switching directions. The sounds of an automatic turntable dropping the next 45 onto the platter. The clunk of changing channels on a 13 channel TV dial. And then the different clunk when the dial broke and you changed channels with a pair of pliers.