The Museum of Endangered Sounds
On the other side of the Internet Brendan Chilcutt is gathering sounds from a not so distant past. Think the spinning of a blank cassette tape, the processing of a floppy disc, the 8-bit voice of a Speak and Spell, all presented as animated gifs.
Via Chilcutt:
I launched the site in January of 2012 as a way to preserve the sounds made famous by my favorite old technologies and electronics equipment. For instance, the textured rattle and hum of a VHS tape being sucked into the womb of a 1983 JVC HR-7100 VCR. As you probably know, it’s a wonderfully complex sound, subtle yet unfiltered. But… imagine a world where we never again hear the symphonic startup of a Windows 95 machine. Imagine generations of children unacquainted with the chattering of angels lodged deep within the recesses of an old cathode ray tube TV. And when the entire world has adopted devices with sleek, silent touch interfaces, where will we turn for the sound of fingers striking QWERTY keypads? Tell me that. And tell me: Who will play my GameBoy when I’m gone?
Imagine!
We love ourselves the collector’s passion, and that someone, somewhere, has taken it upon himself to organize the buck, ping and hum of the electronics we grew up on.