A Sound Break for Your Mind

Episode XII: Obsolete Sounds

Greetings from the year 2023 – a statement that feels like it should include news on flying cars and easy transportation to distant planets and instead is simply a fact of linear time. 

But we’re here and the sounds around us, like ideas, change with advancements in technology. In a few years, the Netflix tone will sound as dated as a modem dial-up. And likely the website Cities and Memories will hold it in posterity with their collection of Obsolete Sounds otherwise lost to a society forever moving forward.

The collection is random and eclectic: an old elevator is next to Astro Wars; some of the names are cheeky, such as ‘the lost sound of the split-flap departure board’; some sounds may rankle you in their inclusion and others might send you spinning back in time to a late-night college thesis due in the morning. 

In a world where the internet has nearly everything, where YouTube can provide you with an uploaded movie shot in 1922 interviewing a man born in 1849, these obsolete sounds start to feel less like the unnecessary hoarded items in a grandparent’s attic (which should and likely will be its own entry on this site) and more like an extension of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. When the machine rusts and when the batteries are dead the sounds – annoying or inconsequential – are gone to history. Recorded and saved, they offer an incredibly modern sensory approach to history and to how our lives have evolved. 

With this new year, we hope you take a moment to look back as well and see where and how far you’ve come. It’s not all wistful nostalgia, either. Your day could have begun with a screaming Windows 95 dial-up, after all.