Obsolete Sounds: collection of disappearing sounds and extinct sounds
citiesandmemory.com
citiesandmemory.com
During the day when call volumes were high, it was cacophony. I've heard it called a "typewriter factory", just a blur of clicking and clacking.
But at night, as the call volume slowed, you could pick out individual calls. A line-relay here as someone goes off-hook, no more sound while they dial (most everyone was touch-tone by this time), but as soon as the control interprets the digits and determines a call path, it's time to set up the path! Junctor frames for some reason had much larger relays, and several of these would fire in rapid succession, followed by a smattering of other relays between the line equipment, the junctor, and some other frames I don't remember.
If you stood in the right place, you could hear the progress of the call as it physically rippled across the machine, each section of the path first switching to a test circuit to make sure it was healthy, then on to the actual circuit, giving and odd staccato double-click sound to each action. Once the call was over, everything would tear down, and all the relays would relax at once.
It's one of the most magical sonic environments I've ever been in, and I've never gotten to share it with anyone.
I asked where he learned to repair them and he simply said, I have one that works, and one that doesn't work, so I'm just going through and finding out what's different
Here's a short clip I took of the restoration in progress:
"4 1/2 minutes of working Strowger, step by step ,Western Electric telephone switch"
The ESS could handle pulse-dial as well, but the pulses only went as far as the subscriber's own line-equipment frame. And most subscribers had gone touch-tone by the time I was there in the 90s, so hearing pulses in the LE was a rarity. Regardless of how the dialed digits came in, the call routing computations were all electronic, which allowed vastly more flexibility. With ESS, you could do traffic-aware routing, you could have non-hierarchial trunking, and you could introduce a whole set of CLASS features like call-waiting and auto-callback. (Plus the machine was much better at diagnosing itself and dropping a trouble-ticket, which considerably reduced maintenance overhead.)
But regardless, what's common to both the SxS in your video, and to the ESS, is that the call path is set up with relays. In the SxS those are stepping relays, aka selectors, and they make the distinctive counting rhythm at each step. In ESS by contrast, they're plain relays (I don't know a term for expressing how plain), which means they're mechanically simpler, smaller, and much more reliable. And each one only goes clack as it pulls in, or thunk as it releases, a single action rather than a counting rhythm.
With the previous systems, a given call might take 20 seconds to dial, and those same 20 seconds to set up the path, the operations are one and the same. So the action of the individual selectors is in lock-step with the subscriber's finger turning the dial, and the dial spring returning it while pulsing out the dial signals which directly drive the relays miles away.
In a pulse-dial office, you hear a lot of clicking all the time, and that's typically several call setups happening all at the same time, overlapping. Each stretched out over 20 seconds or so, starting randomly when subscribers pick up the phone and begin to dial. The "intensity" of the clicking associated with any given call is low, because it takes so long for the action to unfold.
If it's a very slow night in a pulse-dial office, you can hear a single call working its way through the machine, first the hunting of a line-finder as they go off-hook, then digits coming into each successive group, physically establishing the call path across the floor. You can walk through the machine and follow it as it happens.
With ESS, the dialing happens first, the same 20 seconds if the subscriber is using a rotary phone, or more like 2 or 3 seconds on touch-tone. In either case, all the digits are absorbed and interpreted by the central control computer, which decides when enough digits have been dialed to take some action. (Since landlines didn't have a SEND key, the dial-plan had to be structured in such a way as to "know" when the dialing was complete, simply by what had been dialed.)
But once the computer decides to take action, it happens almost all at once -- a flurry of activity as relays throughout the call path are all commanded near-simultaneously. Most take two actions in quick succession: First, the section of the path being set up is connected to a test circuit of some sort, which checks that the relay contacts are clean, the path sounds good, no stray voltages are present, etc. Then in a blink, the test is released and the proven sections are connected to each other. The whole process takes well under a second.
So, in the ESS regime, the clicking associated with a single call happens in a very short burst of rapidfire clicks and clacks, and what you hear over time is numerous calls, unrelated to each other.
(With the exception if you're standing next to the line equipment frame of a subscriber using pulse-dial, where you'll hear 20 seconds of digits slowly coming in, no activity for this call is happening outside this frame, THEN once dialing is complete, there's the burst of rapidfire call-setup throughout the whole machine, just like any other call.)
The clicking in an ESS also has a positional component -- the call path still takes place throughout numerous pieces of the machine, and your stereo ears pick that up -- it just happens so fast, it's like someone tossed a whole tray of items into the air and they all return to earth at nearly the same instant, all around you. If it's a slow night, you can pick out all the clicks associated with one call because they happen so close in time. But you can't take a leisurely walk through the machine and follow that one call as it sets up. By the time your brain registers that anything is happening at all, it's over. A single aural phenomenon with a positional component, rather than a methodical sequence that plays out before the observer.
Didn't old hard-drives use to make sounds as well?
The best part is that I'm pretty sure the audio samples typically come from truly ancient full-height 5¼" stepper motor based drives.[0] The advent of voice coil actuated heads seriously helped quite hard drives.
If the drive was silent and/or the LED was solid on, probably time for a reboot.
It was mostly the hard drive of course (RLL drives IIRC), but the system as a whole had a unique sound.
The build went from nearly silent to keep my wife up at night.
There is a certain thunk-thunk-thunk sound they make, which was awful, but I'm almost positive the 10T disk managed to resonate through the front panel and use it to make itself known. I don't think I can blame the disk for that second part.
Now that I think about, for completeness sake both 9-pin and 24-pin varieties of dot matrix printers should be included as they each produce a unique sound.
Turns out they have more of this weirdly relaxing recordings on their Bandcamp: https://staalplaatlabel.bandcamp.com/album/symphony-2-for-do...
GROAN CHK CHK CHK CHK GROAN blinking red light.
"Oh I guess this disk is worn out I won't get to play that game any more"
I always wanted to take a recording of it, but never found the time. Then I lost it when my basement flooded.
I also lost an old Commodore 1702 monitor. Apparently, they can sell for a few $100. Looks like CRT gaming enthusiasts want them.
....
Another memory: once on that Commodore monitor, and I don't understand how this happened, but I accidentally turned it into a Van Eck device. It picked up a ghost of the picture from a VGA monitor in a separate room. The way to get the picture to appear was by setting the refresh rate and resolution of the video card to some setting that was too high for the VGA monitor.
When on that setting, the VGA monitor would let out a high pitched wine, and the picture got all distorted.
My only guess as to how the picture was being transmitted was that composite video cable plugged into the Commodore monitor was acting as an antenna and picking up some radio waves being transmitted by the VGA monitor.
It comes down to the CRT having a tight color mask and the monitor circuits doing a good job handling the signals. And having seperate color and intensity signals was a bit ahead of it's time. Everyone else got this as s-video.
More useful: the BBC's free library of sound effects.[1]
That I enjoy these quirks means also that I have a sense of pending loss. How much longer will I be driving my 2004 Volvo for example? And I moved this year after 20 years in the same house and no longer hear the train or fire alarm test. Or the sounds of the birds.
But next month I will move from my short-term apartment back into a home that I purchased, and I look forward to getting familiar with its particular auditory quirks.
Here's a question: is this another thing we will lose when we all move to the metaverse? Game designers focus on stunning visuals but seem to neglect these nuances of the auditory realm.
Open world games are pretty good at this in my experience. Maybe I just got lucky with GTA and Zelda, they both had what to me feels like a rich soundscape. How else are you supposed to find all the random little things to interact with?
It should be possible to model things like a babbling brook using an audio generator instead of a loop and combine lots of those into a realistic soundscape.
Analogue communications gear used to expose the general population to the sight and sound of white noise. It doesn't happen any more, as digital gear mutes the audio or presents a blue screen. Most people no longer hear white (or coloured) noise in their life.
There's a certain fascination with seeing/hearing white noise, akin to watching a fire. It's seeing/hearing fundamental thermal or quantum processes in action. The sound of the universe.
> The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel.
He's written about the change in meaning of that line:
Well, not as famous as in Neuromancer, definitely.
Modern digital, smart, auto-tuning TVs will show an error message rather than static when there's no signal available [1], so later authors have used modified homages like:
"The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel." in Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/notinteresting/comments/3mgxca/what...
And not to forget:
"The sky was the color of a dead laptop display, silver-gray and full of rain."
- Charles Stross, The Family Trade. 2004
"The sky above the island was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel—which is to say it was a bright cheery blue.!"
- Robert J. Sawyer, Wake. 2009
There are probably more.
----
"Poet, whose cunning carved this amorous shell, \ Where twain may dwell."
"The peculiarity of these fine though feminine lines," continued "Thunderbolt," "is, as we have said, that they praise the hansom cab by comparing it to the shell, to a natural thing. Now, hear the author of 'Hymns on the Hill,' and how he deals with the same subject. In his fine nocturne, entitled 'The Last Omnibus' he relieves the rich and poignant melancholy of the theme by a sudden sense of rushing at the end—
'The wind round the old street corner \ Swung sudden and quick as a cab.'
"Here the distinction is obvious. 'Daisy Daydream' thinks it a great compliment to a hansom cab to be compared to one of the spiral chambers of the sea. And the author of 'Hymns on the Hill' thinks it a great compliment to the immortal whirlwind to be compared to a hackney coach. He surely is the real admirer of London. We have no space to speak of all his perfect applications of the idea; of the poem in which, for instance, a lady's eyes are compared, not to stars, but to two perfect street-lamps guiding the wanderer. We have no space to speak of the fine lyric, recalling the Elizabethan spirit, in which the poet, instead of saying that the rose and the lily contend in her complexion, says, with a purer modernism, that the red omnibus of Hammersmith and the white omnibus of Fulham fight there for the mastery. How perfect the image of two contending omnibuses!"”
There is also a reasonable chance the rendition is a simulation based on a pseudorandom generator.
ffmpeg -f rawvideo -video_size 1280x720 -pixel_format yuv420p -framerate 25 \
-i /dev/urandom -ar 48000 -ac 2 -f s16le -i /dev/urandom -codec:a copy \
-vf hue=s=0 -f matroska - | ffplay -It wasn't until I saw this Drunk History with Jenny Slate that I learned the noise is the cosmic background radiation, the ongoing "ohm" of the big bang.
I have been told, from time to time, that I am a large component of that static.
https://www.wondriumdaily.com/fermilab-scientist-explains-st...
I knew a guy, 30 years ago, who grew up in Toronto, moved to Ottawa, and got there by taking the bus.
He had literally never been outside, unless in the downtown core of a large city. Never.
And this is in Canada! Wtf!
Toronto is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto
petrol pump
grinding gears
TV channel changing
radio station tuning
audio cassette rewinding
respectful disagreement
complete sentences
licking a stamp
their voices
birdsong
breath licking a stamp
breath
dial-tone (of various countries / eras)https://www.homedepot.com/p/Champion-Power-Equipment-9-in-79...
I've not heard the sounds made by this in 20 years, and I know they're still used, but its a sound that is specific to suburbia, and only specific regions in the country.
Another sound that comes to mind from my childhood is the sound that a manual push mower made when being used (or for that matter a gas powered reel mower).
My current music project is based around building up layered droning sounds using cassette tape loops. I’ve been using AM radio tuning noises and modem noises. A big part of my influence has been finding old, obsolete, extinct sounds and making them come alive again.
Uncatalyzed exhaust fumes
Oily exhaust fumes
A neighbourhood full of Wood fires (still common in some places, but maybe not forever)
New car smell has changed over time, because interior materials have changed
When I was a kid I had an aging Commodore 64 and a stack of disks with pirated games. Loading games was a slow process, you'd often wait full minutes for your game to load (and this was the fast option, tapes were far worse), hoping against hope it would all work right. It would often make this sudden GROAN noise when trying to read that I assume was a sudden seek.
And when it would fail, it would make this GROAN CHK CHK CHK CHK GROAN noise. No idea what it was, but it was etched into my mind as "this load isn't going to work, this game-disk might be dead".
That failure is the "extinct sound" that's been etched into my memory.
Read errors would cause it to repeat this routine.
You can find 1541 videos all over youtube, including repair videos, many of which include this sound as part of the drive initialization and diagnostics.
The 1541 went through several generations and could be built with mechanisms from several different manufacturers, which will change the timbre of the sound. So will the table that the drive is sitting on, for that matter.
A tree being chopped down with an axe[1]
A pedal-driven wood-lathe[2]
A 9600-baud modem, dialling[3]
Someone undergoing amputation without anaesthetic[4]
[0] Young's still deliver using a horse-drawn dray in SW London.
[1] My son is a tree-surgeon; he doesn't even own an axe.
[2] I expect quite a few craftsmen still have a home-made lathe.
[3] I used to own a 9600-baud acoustic coupler.
[4] I guess this still happens, e.g. on battlefields.
Yellowstone: https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/photosmultimedia/soundlibrary...
Rocky Mountain National Park: https://www.nps.gov/romo/learn/photosmultimedia/soundlibrary...
IE, don't list all the sounds in a tiny box with scrollbars, (that's then inside of a longer page that scrolls). Just list them on the website without any kind of intermediary scroll box.
Maybe I'm just used to faster modems (56K V.90)?
Open call – your field recordings of obsolete sounds wanted - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31514774 - May 2022 (58 comments)
Cities and Memory: global collaborative field sound recording project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17007161 - May 2018 (1 comment)
But there is so much left. The credit-card roller cachunk-cachunk when the carbon was pressed into the card at every cash register station. The sound of a floppy spinning up. The ding of an old-fashioned gas pump.
The whine of a tube TV flyback transformer!
If smell can conjure up long-forgotten images and experiences, what of sound? It has to be a close second.
1 Where genuine recordings exists
I am with you on leafblowers. I've heard they cause less damage to the ground than a rake, but the annoyance factor is high.
I'm still waiting for the deliverance of whisper quiet cargo trains, or cargo trains that blast some noise cancelling factor as they pass, or hell, a separate underground line just for cargo.
When I was younger and lived in Jamaica (Queens), there was this particular TALKING car alarm that was very touchy and drove me up the wall.
"Protected by Viper, stand back."
It was so bad.
I’m actually having trouble finding a source on the exact rules of the ban, but there are old news articles suggesting that after-market alarms with motion activation were the focus: https://www.qgazette.com/articles/car-alarm-sales-banned-by-...
I do agree with the op's list, but i do find cargo trains particularly rhythmic, and very soothing. When out cycling and a railway barrier drops, everyone gets delayed. I forget I'm cycling. The longer the train, the better.
Or anything related to cars in general hopefully
Leaf blowers I’m afraid are here to stay, but the electric ones make a less annoying sound at least.
Many, many things follow this pattern.
My neighborhood is a mix of income levels; those who do their own lawn use smaller equipment, and they use one at a time. The wealthy ones have a crew of 6-8 people with a loud mower, multiple weed whackers/trimmers and multiple leaf blowers all at the same time. On the noise level, I measured it to be as loud as a jet airplane taking off—except it lasts a whole hour.
And don't forget that these same demographics have a large hand in the economic and regulatory situation that makes only highly efficient and mechanized professional landscaping viable.
I'd respect these people a lot more if they'd acknowledge and accept the tradeoffs but it really rubs me the wrong way when people say we need nigher minimum wages and then turn around and complain that their landscaper is forced to go all in on mechanized efficiency.
Not everything is a class struggle.
But it’s more the capital investment, why bother replacing what is working?
First off, the exposed engine isn't what makes a vehicle loud, unless you count the valve train noise and primary chain noise which honestly is negligible compared to everything else. What makes a Harley loud is the fact that it doesn't have a resonator muffler but basically a pipe with a baffle. Example of a resonator muffler: https://www.quadratec.com/sites/default/files/knowledge_base.... Example of a motorcycle muffler: https://thekneeslider.com/images/hddynamicexhaust.jpg
Second, a modern stock Harley tops out at 79 dB which is below the EPA requirement of 80 dB. This is no louder than a modern car. In California specifically this is also enforced and you can't (to a first approximation) register a vehicle that exceeds this (CARB regulation).
Most Harley you hear that are loud use aftermarket muffler or full exhaust systems (larger diameter, no catalytic converter, etc.) which are labeled as "for closed course only" because they aren't street legal. Still, motorcycles by and large can outrun cop cars so nobody bothers pulling them over. Also, most police officers don't carry dB meters to be able to determine if after you registered the vehicle you swapped the exhaust system.
Now for the reason: yes it makes a huge difference in the feel of you on the bike. The sound is half the equation. And no that doesn't justify bothering all your neighbors, but it is a visceral feeling you can't get any other way. Some people want it and will break the law to get it.
The good news for you is that bikes are getting quieter and more efficient and most people are realizing the effects of hearing loss from long term exposure to loud exhausts. However you will never get everyone to stop: there will always be a small minority that wants a loud vehicle and people who don't participate in this activity will always have a hard time understanding why.
If you want to have an experience, take a week off, rent a muscle car, and ride it cross country on a road trip. It'll be life changing, I promise.
When I was living near San Jose, the mockingbirds all sang the song of the car alarm. Over time, as the original songbird was no longer everypresent, the song got corrupted. I'd love to hear what it's gotten to now. Although, not at 2 am, ugh.