This is a fascinating subject that indicates how much things have changed across the relatively short span of my lifetime. The list includes some things that are major background memories of my life growing up in good old Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Things like ...
The sounds of a rotary telephone ... the swish of the turn of the dial and the click-click-click as it returned to the home position has been replaced by the beeps and boops of modern digital technology. And you may remember the sequence from Alfred Hitchcock's classic film Dial M for Murder in which we saw the little mechanical switches in the telephone exchange falling into place one by one as evil husband Ray Milland dialed wife Grace Kelly to set her up for the killer lurking in the shadows ...
The chunk!-chunk!-chunk! sound of a channel-changing dial on a television set ...
A record changer. There are fewer and fewer of us who probably remember the sound of a stack of records falling one by one onto the turntable of a record player. An mp3 file doesn't make that satisfying slap-click-skritch-skritch-skritch sound sequence as it cues up to play on your iPod. This goes along with ...
The click and repetitive sound clips of a broken record. Nowadays, many people don't even know what you mean when you tell them they sound like a broken record. After all, mp3's don't usually break.
The ka-chunk!, ka-ching! of the old-style, 500-pound cash register, which has been replaced by the digital beeps and boops of the laser scanner ...
And the happy ding-ding! that rang out when you drove your car over the signal bell hose at the local gas station. No need for such an outmoded thing now that virtually every gas station in the country is self-service.
Times are changing, and so is the background noise. I miss some of those comforting old sounds, even if life may be a bit easier because the technologies and services they represent have been replaced by ones which are newer and (perhaps) better. Sigh.
What are the sounds that you don't hear any more? Leave a comment.
Have a good day. May your background noises be pleasant ones.
More thoughts tomorrow.
Bilbo
The "whirr..." of the tape deck or tape recorder.
ReplyDeleteI remember all of these...sadly!
ReplyDeleteAfter a skipping record I also remember having to put a matchbook folded in my 8 track in my car to keep it from skipping. And there was no FF or REW you had to ride around until the song came up again. Aah, the memories.
I also miss the phone ring. Now I have to listen to all kinds of "crap" instead of a phone ring.
I remember the sound of the rotary phone because those things lasted forever. The one I remember may have been from the 1960s or 1970s or so. My grandparents believed in using it until it no longer worked or could be repaired.
ReplyDeleteI posted this list awhile back but I didn't have the site with the videos. Nice post upgrade.
ReplyDeleteWv: surfus - The top of the water when the water is a little irritated.
While I like technology in the main, sometimes with all the noise-generating sources I am confused as to what appliance emitted the sound. Cell phones can sound like anything now.
ReplyDeleteTypewriter sounds: "ding" of the end of the line, the return "clunk" as the carriage reset to a new line, and the "zip-zip-zip" of the paper being put in or pulled out.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, all the gas stations in NJ are full service; no self serve here. It gets brought up in the legislature every year or two but has always gotten nowhere. Besides the jobs that would be lost, people prefer to not pump their own and it wouldn't save the customer money since the price would be the same.