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Obsolete Sounds: collection of disappearing sounds and extinct sounds
- neilv 4y agoI look forward to the day this site includes then-obsolete city sounds of leaf blowers, car alarms, cars that honk the horn whenever getting in and out, ear-shattering truck backup beeps... :)
- toast0 4y ago> car alarms 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.
- tetris11 4y agoThat's funny, I havent heard a car alarm in over a decade - I just assumed that car manufacturers stopped rolling them out after consumers kept going to garages to dismantle them. 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.
- papito 4y agoNYC, for example, outlawed car alarms years ago, as it was a complete nuisance. Some are still grandfathered and some are probably illegally installed. I hear them sometimes, but it's pretty rare. 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.
- sfuller 4y ago"I know you wanna look inside but I suggest you step away from the ride." "Protected by Viper, stand back."
- papito 4y agoYeah, the Viper one. GOD.
- leviathant 4y agoI have been tampered with! I have been tampered with! It was so bad.
- spcebar 4y agoFor the uninducted: https://youtu.be/n2lXuQFNHQ8?t=75 https://youtu.be/n2lXuQFNHQ8?t=75
- philwelch 4y agoOkay, nobody mentioned it was a rapping car alarm. This is hilarious, though I can imagine it getting old pretty fast.
- jbotdev 4y agoThey may have banned after-market alarms, but factory-installed car alarms are standard on pretty much every new car in the past 10+ years anyway. I still hear those go off on occasion in NYC. 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-council-vote-may-be-vetoed-by-mayor/ https://www.qgazette.com/articles/car-alarm-sales-banned-by-...
- InCityDreams 4y ago>or cargo trains that blast some noise cancelling factor as they pass 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.
- bombcar 4y agoWhen the crossings are turned to hornless it’s actually kind of nice to have them slip by - you can feel more than hear it.
- zach_garwood 4y agoThere's a guy with a 20-year-old Mitsubishi Galant with a car alarm that goes off constantly on my block. I've never worked up the courage to ask who he thinks would actually steal his POS.
- lm28469 4y ago> then-obsolete city sounds of leaf blowers, car alarms, cars that honk the horn whenever getting in and out, ear-shattering truck backup beeps... Or anything related to cars in general hopefully
- whoopdedo 4y agoI was really looking forward to not hearing ICE sounds everywhere. But alas, scary stories about "silent" cars means we'll have to live with that for a while longer.
- jbotdev 4y agoI’d like to add to that list: [gas/ICE] motorcycles, modified car exhausts, pretty much any small gas engine (power washers, snow blowers, generators). Leaf blowers I’m afraid are here to stay, but the electric ones make a less annoying sound at least.
- GoOnThenDoTell 4y agoICE leaf blowers will get banned city by city
- dsfyu404ed 4y agoThey'll get banned in the rich enclaves and immediately outlying wealthy suburbs and once those people are satisfied the movement will lose momentum because no other demographic has this problem high enough up on their list of problems to be actionable. And in 100yr when we all manipulate leaves in a different way because it's "just better" people will wonder where the obscure law came from. Many, many things follow this pattern.
- thesuitonym 4y agoIt doesn't have to take off everywhere to solve the problem. When enough wealthy people don't want ICE leaf blowers, the market will change and they'll become more scarce.
- athenot 4y agoOddly enough the wealthy suburbs are the ones where there are the most leaf blowing going on. Desire for manicured landscapes + money to pay for lanscaping services that normally service commercial properties = small armies of leafblowing workers deployed all over the place. 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.
- voxadam 4y agoStudded tires would be another one I'd add to that list.
- welder 4y agoThe first time I was in Tokyo the most amazing thing was the lack of noise downtown.
- CrypticShift 4y ago-> https://citiesandmemory.com/sounds/ https://citiesandmemory.com/sounds/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- femto 4y agoWhite noise. 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.
- Borrible 4y ago“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
- eru 4y agoFamously re-used by Neal Stephenson to refer to a blue sky.
- tinco 4y agoI think you mean Neil Gaiman? and I'm not sure if it's really famous.. at least not as famous as its use in Neuromancer?
- duskwuff 4y agoCorrect, that was Neil Gaiman in Neverwhere: > 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: https://twitter.com/neilhimself/status/1546178115038334977 https://twitter.com/neilhimself/status/1546178115038334977
- eru 4y agoI probably mixed people up. Well, not as famous as in Neuromancer, definitely.
- kolanos 4y agoI thought he was describing a gray sky? Are there televisions that display blue static?
- jazzyjackson 4y agoMaybe I missed it, no CRT ka-thunk?
- voxadam 4y agoThe sound of the degaussing coil should definitely be in there.
- theandrewbailey 4y agoI didn't see any, but I have my own. About 10 years ago, I got a 17" Dell CRT, manufactured around 2005. Sticking a live microphone underneath it was one of the first things I did. https://theandrewbailey.com/file/CRT.flac https://theandrewbailey.com/file/CRT.flac
- Snoddas 4y agoIt would be neat if someone added samples of extinct[1] or endangered languages. 1 Where genuine recordings exists
- sethammons 4y agoLots of Native American languages are "endangered," such as Salish. You can find videos of elders speaking it but most younger tribal members don't bother learning it outside a few words.
- kbf 4y agoI promise you Super Mario Bros. is not disappearing or extinct.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- DoingIsLearning 4y agoDoes anyone know what font is used in the sound list? It gave me some serious 8 bit game nostalgia. :)
- apeescape 4y agoIt's Press Start 2P, see https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Press+Start+2P https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Press+Start+2P
- mihaaly 4y agoAt the Philips coffee grinder I even smelled the coffee. : )
- Klaster_1 4y agoMy dad had a Zenith he no longer used, I loved winding it up and firing the shutter. After hearing exactly this sound from the childhood, I immediately remembered how things were back then, thank you.
- Kaibeezy 4y agopetrol pump grinding gears TV channel changing radio station tuning audio cassette rewinding respectful disagreement complete sentences licking a stamp their voices birdsong breath
- jagged-chisel 4y agolicking a stamp I grew up with lickable stamps and never heard a sound when they’re being licked. breath When does this become obsolete? Humans still breathe…
- Kaibeezy 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_license https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_license
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- speed_spread 4y agoWhen there are no breathers anymore, obviously.
- tomcatfish 4y agoThey meant licking an eStamp, duh
- lozf 4y agodial-tone (of various countries / eras)
- wkjagt 4y agoNot meant as one I guess but this reads like a poem.
- jensgk 4y agoVisit their Bandcamp page and buy some of their great tracks: https://citiesandmemory.bandcamp.com/music https://citiesandmemory.bandcamp.com/music
- eigenhombre 4y agoTheir album which incorporates some of these sounds is pay-what-you-want, and I found it enjoyable enough to support/purchase.
- jensgk 4y agoSo did I :-)
- voxadam 4y agoI'm surprised the sounds of a floppy (3½", 5¼", and maybe even an 8") are all missing. I'd argue that the insertion and lock sounds, and seek sounds are absolutely necessary, at the very least.
- fatnoah 4y agoI'll add the specific case of the Commodore 1541 disk drive. The sound clacking and banging of that thing loading data is seared into my memory. Brrrrr-brrrrrr-dat-dat-dat-dat-dat.
- Pxtl 4y agoI was thinking that exact sound when I opened this post. 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"
- TruthWillHurt 4y agoFor sure! Didn't old hard-drives use to make sounds as well?
- TruthWillHurt 4y agoOh yea they did! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6xXihb8hv8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6xXihb8hv8
- voxadam 4y agoI love that many of those sounds are still used in in modern movies. The seek sounds seem to particularly popular when in a NOC or during a hacking scene. 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. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNSEfgESF_k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNSEfgESF_k
- denton-scratch 4y agoA horse-drawn brewer's dray[0] 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.
- cm42 4y ago[4] The sound of being K-holed +/- rotor blades
- TruthWillHurt 4y agoModem dialup sounds wrong to me. Maybe I'm just used to faster modems (56K V.90)? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xalTFH5ht-k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xalTFH5ht-k
- ghaff 4y agoI used modems going back to 1200 bps. Yeah, that sounds off in a number of ways to me.
- ptato 4y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHk2T8fCYSw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHk2T8fCYSw this would be "the grinder's whistle" for me :)
- rootsudo 4y agoThere is no CRT whrr sound, when you turn it on, nor the high pitched whine.
- egberts1 4y agoYou hear a slow rise low tone to a quick medium tone to a slow fall of a low all in a span of 1-2 seconds of the degaussed built into every CRT monitors since 1974.
- adnmcq999 4y agoTurboautismo
- ehnto 4y agoAdjacent to this, a catalog of forgotten smells. A little harder to curate. 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 As for sounds, one for me is weekly air raid/fire early warning siren. At least, the type of siren is different now.
- vongomben 4y agoHow are these sounds licensed? Pardon me if it's easy to find. I couldn't
- intrasight 4y agoI really enjoy the quirks in my auditory environment. The train whistle in the distance. The particular squeaks in my wood floor. The municipal fire alarm test at the fire station. The weird and unique noises that my old man of a car makes. Cars - even new ones - are pretty unique acoustically. I could always tell when my wife was driving up the street because of the distinct sound of her Honda CR-V. 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.
- Swizec 4y ago> 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?
- thfuran 4y agoDo either of those games have binaural audio?
- bombcar 4y agoThey often have background noise on a loop or loops and once you notice it’s annoying. 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.
- patchorang 4y agoBenn Jordan (The Flashbulb) has a series of videos where he goes to remote locations to record ambiance without noise pollution, a disappearing sound. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1i_ECeB2fo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1i_ECeB2fo
- jabroni_salad 4y agoThe National Park Service has a few sound libraries too: Yellowstone: https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/photosmultimedia/soundlibrary.htm https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/photosmultimedia/soundlibrary... Rocky Mountain National Park: https://www.nps.gov/romo/learn/photosmultimedia/soundlibrary.htm https://www.nps.gov/romo/learn/photosmultimedia/soundlibrary...
- gwbas1c 4y agoAlthough I appreciate the look, I'd rather have a normal-scrolling website. 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.
- agentultra 4y agoWhat an awesome site. 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.
- eigenhombre 4y agoNeat. Published anywhere?
- agentultra 4y agoNot yet! I kind of made a mistake talking about it. But if I can get it over the finish line I'll probably post links in my profile, on socials, etc.
- shae 4y agoThe BBC SFX collection is larger, and freely available for download
- cm42 4y ago@todo - research best microphone to capture "my dignity"
- waltbosz 4y agoThis post reminds me this video monitor I used to own. When you turned it on, it would beep twice (with two different tones), and then say "O.K." in a robotic voice. 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.
- ddingus 4y agoYeah, the 1702 is a great display for the 8 and 16 bit eras of gaming and computing. 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.
- jgrahamc 4y agoWhat make was the speaking video monitor? Was it a CRT or LCD?
- waltbosz 4y agoI can't recall the make of the speaking monitor. It was an old 13" CRT, probably made in the late 80s, early 90s.
- Aloha 4y agoThere is.. I grew up in Los Angeles, and every gardener used a three wheeled edger. https://www.homedepot.com/p/Champion-Power-Equipment-9-in-79-cc-Gas-Powered-4-Stroke-Walk-Behind-Lawn-Edger-100731/317675249 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).
- Pxtl 4y agoThe old "obsolete sound" I'd love to find: 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.
- myself248 4y agoThe 1541 was too cheap to include a track-0 sensor, so when the drive didn't know where it was, it would just seek backwards against its mechanical stop, the maximum number of tracks, thus guaranteeing that wherever it had been, it was now at track 0. 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.
- pdntspa 4y agoNo download links? What the hell!
- mxmlnkn 4y agoYou could parse awp1.json and awp2.json to get all links.
- drewzero1 4y agoThis reminded me that I need to record a few sounds from my '90s car while I still have it: the clunk of the manual locks, the ka-chunk of the tape deck, and the whirr of the automatic seat belts.
- dang 4y agoRelated: Open call – your field recordings of obsolete sounds wanted - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31514774 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17007161 - May 2018 (1 comment)
- userbinator 4y agoOne that comes to mind but is absent from the list is a 2-stroke diesel (plenty of samples on YouTube nonetheless); then again, that's mostly an American thing and the list appears to be UK/Europe themed.
- Animats 4y agoIt's not a collection of old sounds. It's a collection of "reimagined" sounds - old sound effects overlaid with random background music. Try "film projector" and "cash register". They both have music on top. More useful: the BBC's free library of sound effects.[1] [1] https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/ https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/
- pfist 4y agoAs far as I can tell, each sound in the library has both an original recording and the artist “reimagined” version.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoAlso the modem dialup… What is it??
- guenthert 4y agoYup the "Air raid siren test" sounds like a sound track of a B movie, nothing like an actual siren.
- WalterBright 4y agoNothing sounds like a Merlin V12 aircraft engine. Audio recordings of it are all pretty sad. The real thing gets rarer every year.
- myself248 4y agoI wish I had been able to sneak good stereo recorder into a 1A ESS telephone switch. These had electronic computerized control, but the call-path was all electromechanical, and the sound of relays opening and closing all around was otherworldly. A typical ESS machine might occupy several thousand square feet, so you could walk through it and hear the activity all around you. 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.
- jazzyjackson 4y agoCan't imagine a whole room of them, but I did have the pleasure of hearing this sound at the InfoAge museum in New Jersey. Wondering the building at the vintage computer fest last year I heard the clacking and poked my head into the room and ended up having a pleasant conversation with a man restoring the equipment 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: https://youtu.be/Oiq20VWskmM https://youtu.be/Oiq20VWskmM
- femto 4y agoSomething like this? It probably doesn't capture the directionality of the sound in the way you describe. "4 1/2 minutes of working Strowger, step by step ,Western Electric telephone switch" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-pd3GjNMWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-pd3GjNMWc
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoAn ambitious project and a good start. 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.