What do AOL Instant Messenger, the Nokia 3310 ringtone, a game of PacMan, and rewinding a VHS tape have in common? These are objects or software from our past that have more or less disappeared and that have marked their era with their characteristic sound.
But since most of these things use technologies that are either extinct or dying out, these sounds are fading from common memory!
This is why Brendan Chilcutt decided to launch a website museum and made it a way to preserve the sounds made famous by his favorite old technologies and electronic equipment.
Listen to the sound of lost technologies at the Museum of Endangered Sounds
The idea may seem absurd, but the Museum of Endangered Sounds (Museum of Disappearing Sounds) is an initiative that is both old-fashioned, poetic and of general interest!
Indeed, by collecting sounds from old technologies, it helps preserve part of their history. And for the most nostalgic, it allows you to rediscover sensations that are sometimes forgotten. Just like smells or old photos, sounds carry memories!
On the museum site, all the sounds are represented by black and white images on which you can click to start the sound…
The music of Tetris on Game Boy always makes me jump back to the early 90s when I received my expensive gray console. The sound of the modem connecting to the Internet takes me back 20 or 25 years when you had to make sure that no one was on the phone to be able to go on the web!
You will also find there, and without being exhaustive, the sound of the Tamagotchi, that of the start-up of the Macintosh or Windows 95, the scratching of a needle printer, the clicking when inserting a NES cartridge... and many others!
In short, this museum is not very big (around thirty sounds) but brings together sounds that will surely speak to all those who grew up during the 80s and 90s!
