The Museum of Endangered Sounds is the brainchild of Brendan 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," he noted. "Imagine a world where we never again hear the symphonic startup of a Windows 95 machine!"
It's quite interesting because, in a way, it's not as much about preserving the sounds as it recognizing that sound itself elicits such a direct response from us.
Sounds can bring us back to a different time and place. We know if you're reading this newsletter, you're likely a busy person balancing approximately 4006 different things, but we'd encourage you to take a moment to visit the site and go down memory lane.
Some of the sounds you'll encounter include:
- The notification sounds from AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ.
- Mac Warning and Mac Startup.
- Nokia Ringtone
- Dial-Up Internet
- Windows 95 Startup (this one brought us back)
It applies to all technology though, so you've also got nods to gaming with sounds from popular games like Tetris and Pac-Man, as well as MindMaze and Number Munchers.
You've got throwbacks to "TV Snow" and VCR Rewinding, as well as old school printers and telephones.
The internet, as we all know, can be a rather tense and combative place at times, so it's nice to sometimes have a site like this which is focused only on preserving some sounds that will be lost if no one aims to preserve them.
As Brendan so perfectly puts it, "If you don't understand my passion and the significance of my work, you probably never will. But if you do, then you've come to the right place."
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