Brendan Chilcutt is, like many Dangerous Minds readers surely are, a collector of cultural ephemera. But his trove is not of real world objects, but once-common sounds that we no longer regularly hear. This is a relatively recent phenomenon on Planet Earth—the changes in the technological components of everyday life that became very rapid in the second half of the 20th Century have been accelerating even faster since the 1980s, to the point where now a gizmo that’s only a few years old can seem like a relic of a bygone time.

According to the about page for Chilcutt’s online Museum of Endangered Sounds:

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, as streaming playback becomes more common in the US, and as people in developing nations like Canada and the UK get brought up to DVD players, it’s likely that the world will have seen and heard the last of older machines like the HR-7100. And as new products come to market, we stand to lose much more than VCRs.

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?

It’s questions like that last one that have never once kept me up at night, but to each…
 

 
While some of Chilcutt’s dozens of collected sounds date back to the turn of the 20th Century (the rotary phone dial) or the Great Depression (the teletype), most of the tech here comes from after the mid ‘70s—Space Invaders and Pac Man; the wheel-grind of a cassette player; AOL IM alerts; Brian Eno’s Windows95 startup sound; that satisfying THUNK of inserting video game console cartridges; the whirr of a rewinding VHS; the sound of a floppy drive reading a disc; and OF COURSE the dial-up modem connection sound sequence is present.

The interface allows for more than one sound to be played at once, and I definitely recommend creating some musical compositions by mixing and matching a few or several at once (a welcome dialog advises the user “if you like industrial music, try turning on all the thumbnails at once!”) It seems like there could be so much more to this collection, and devices are becoming obsolete at an ever-accelerating rate. But this also seems to be a bigger project for Mr. Chilcutt than just a web toy—he states that his ten-year plan is “to complete the data collection phase by the year 2015, and spend the next seven years developing the proper markup language to reinterpret the sounds as a binary composition.” So he may have more sounds collected than he’s posted so far.

The lag may also be due to the fact that, as he bluntly puts it, “I have eight gerbils.”
 

 
Hat tip to Mr. Lawrence Daniel Caswell for this find.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
John Peel’s Record Collection to become on-line interactive museum