I appreciate the effort, but there's no way stuff like "Space Invaders" and "Pac Man" sound effects are endangered. It'll be around forever via emulation and IP-value extraction (e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Bandai-Namco-Flashback-Blast-Console-...), at least until "retro" stops being cool.
Now, the cacophony of a popular video game arcade...
Yeah, I have multiple sets of some of these sounds in WAV format, as do many others. Hard to believe anything about them is "endangered"
In fact, why isn't this site providing a downloadable link to these files? If he is really interested in preservation, they should provide a download link instead of paragraphs of fluff.
Because the really endangered concept here is the notion of "files", which anyone publishing anything on the cloud seems to want to do away with.
> Yeah, I have multiple sets of some of these sounds in WAV format, as do many others. Hard to believe anything about them is "endangered"
I would say sounds that exist mainly as WAVs on someone's computer are properly endangered.
The point I was making is that some of these sounds are from things (mainly video games) that will be endlessly (and easily) recycled forever, so they aren't actually endangered. Others, from formerly ubiquitous but now utterly obsolete hardware and software, are truly engendered.
>> Now, the cacophony of a popular video game arcade...
We’ve got maybe half a dozen arcade bars here in Toronto that are so popular lines form out the door virtually every Friday and Saturday night - particularly awesome is the TILT arcade bar around Bathurst and Dundas.
It’s an insane deal, too - $5, taxes in, gets you all you can play for pretty much as long as you’d like to stay there. They have dozens of original arcade cabinets, from fighters to light gun games to a double cabinet Mario Kart that you can do 2P versus on.
They even have booths with retro consoles like N64, SNES, Sega Genesis, etc; so people can play Mario Kart 64, etc. It’s seriously magical.
It’s brought arcades back in a way that I thought I’d never experience again - but now that I’m 32 I can enjoy a beer while my girlfriend and I beat the shit out of each other on a genuine Street Fighter II cabinet.
The cacophony of the arcade is very, very much real at these places, and TILT is one of my favourite date night places in the city. :)
Maybe the trend hasn’t hit your city yet - I know most major cities in the States have similar places - but arcades are not only alive and well, but thriving; and have been given a second lease on life that few dead industries get.
Was going to make the same suggestion. The Evan Doorbell tapes you link to are great for learning about that lost world.
I can remember that when I was a kid, once you started dialing, the phone would go silent--almost. What you would actually hear was hiss, ghostly clicks now and then, and, occasionally, very quietly, down near the noise floor, short bursts of tones - beep boop boop beep boop beep!
I learned about blueboxes and the like later (in what were histories by then) and I know what I was hearing was some kind of crosstalk, but I never found out whether the tones were MF tones (one telco switch signaling to another to set up the call, in the voice band, but just before the phones on either end were patched into the circuit) or (similar, but different) DTMF tones from modems and fax machines on the local circuit. (I vaguely remember occasionally hearing tentative tones like from a real person pressing buttons.)
All the electromechanical hacks from the midcentury systems that were sometimes still in place in the 80s and even 90s are fascinating -- the earliest direct dial systems had to set up the connection digit by digit because they had no memory. Later they invented systems that could remember some of the digits by temporarily connecting your circuit to a literal mechanical stepper on the telco end that would replay those digits to the next switch down the line (and then disconnect) once you had dialed enough digits to fill it up.
DTMF was used for in-band signaling. For example pulse calls would be encoded into it, and then those tones were relayed. Probably why they sounded like a fax machine auto dialing.
That was my first thought when reading this headline: do they preserve silence? But he's absolutely right. After light pollution, noise pollution is probably the second most ignored type of pollution, and quite important imo.
Where are the Commodore 64 SID chip tunes? Never Ending Story, Rambo, Green Beret, Attack of the Mutant Camels. Of course none of those sounds are 'endangered', just nostalgia.
I have one that still works, but I'll probably live to regret leaving our 68k Mac on 24x7 for like a year in order to get a tiny amount of distributed.net RC5-64 hash rate.
How about the sound of children playing outside? The sound of a baseball popping into a well-worn leather mitt still exists, but is becoming awfully rare. It ain't tech, but it's a byproduct of tech.
My favorite endangered sound is probably too subtle for the museum and, alas, one I can no longer hear anyway: the 15625 Hz squeal of an NTSC cathode ray tube TV.
I can remember knowing whether the TV had been turned off or was just on mute (with no video input) well into the 90s just by the sound.
I don't know. The last time I regularly used a standard def CRT TV was in 2005. Pretty sure I could hear it then at 30-ish. Sometime last year I pulled up a Youtube video that plays a rising tone up through 20kHz. I stopped being able to hear the tone somewhere between 10kHz and 15 kHz. My kids could hear it fine.
The sound lives on in my memory. I can vividly remember the squeee of turning the TV on. Actually I can hear it right now! But I believe that is something called "tinnitus" :)
Imagine all the automotive engine sounds that need to be archived. Looking around my desk: the low hum of a spinning hard disk. Mechanical stop watch. The snap of micro USB.
I get it, the site is mostly about fun and the internet.
But reminds me also of lost things like "the feeling of being in the backseat of a 1978 Beetle with no air conditioning as a kid on a road trip" and other lost sensations.
36 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 95.0 ms ] threadThought it looked familiar, 9th time this is posted on HN.
http://www.w2sjw.com/radio_sounds.html
Now, the cacophony of a popular video game arcade...
In fact, why isn't this site providing a downloadable link to these files? If he is really interested in preservation, they should provide a download link instead of paragraphs of fluff.
Because the really endangered concept here is the notion of "files", which anyone publishing anything on the cloud seems to want to do away with.
I would say sounds that exist mainly as WAVs on someone's computer are properly endangered.
The point I was making is that some of these sounds are from things (mainly video games) that will be endlessly (and easily) recycled forever, so they aren't actually endangered. Others, from formerly ubiquitous but now utterly obsolete hardware and software, are truly engendered.
What year?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6aNPsjNwFo&list=PL5G6BYUMbQ...
We’ve got maybe half a dozen arcade bars here in Toronto that are so popular lines form out the door virtually every Friday and Saturday night - particularly awesome is the TILT arcade bar around Bathurst and Dundas.
It’s an insane deal, too - $5, taxes in, gets you all you can play for pretty much as long as you’d like to stay there. They have dozens of original arcade cabinets, from fighters to light gun games to a double cabinet Mario Kart that you can do 2P versus on.
They even have booths with retro consoles like N64, SNES, Sega Genesis, etc; so people can play Mario Kart 64, etc. It’s seriously magical.
It’s brought arcades back in a way that I thought I’d never experience again - but now that I’m 32 I can enjoy a beer while my girlfriend and I beat the shit out of each other on a genuine Street Fighter II cabinet.
The cacophony of the arcade is very, very much real at these places, and TILT is one of my favourite date night places in the city. :)
Maybe the trend hasn’t hit your city yet - I know most major cities in the States have similar places - but arcades are not only alive and well, but thriving; and have been given a second lease on life that few dead industries get.
I can remember that when I was a kid, once you started dialing, the phone would go silent--almost. What you would actually hear was hiss, ghostly clicks now and then, and, occasionally, very quietly, down near the noise floor, short bursts of tones - beep boop boop beep boop beep!
I learned about blueboxes and the like later (in what were histories by then) and I know what I was hearing was some kind of crosstalk, but I never found out whether the tones were MF tones (one telco switch signaling to another to set up the call, in the voice band, but just before the phones on either end were patched into the circuit) or (similar, but different) DTMF tones from modems and fax machines on the local circuit. (I vaguely remember occasionally hearing tentative tones like from a real person pressing buttons.)
All the electromechanical hacks from the midcentury systems that were sometimes still in place in the 80s and even 90s are fascinating -- the earliest direct dial systems had to set up the connection digit by digit because they had no memory. Later they invented systems that could remember some of the digits by temporarily connecting your circuit to a literal mechanical stepper on the telco end that would replay those digits to the next switch down the line (and then disconnect) once you had dialed enough digits to fill it up.
I've been tempted to write something the monitors kernel io stats and softly beeps at me, but maybe those days should just stay behind us...
I have one that still works, but I'll probably live to regret leaving our 68k Mac on 24x7 for like a year in order to get a tiny amount of distributed.net RC5-64 hash rate.
I can remember knowing whether the TV had been turned off or was just on mute (with no video input) well into the 90s just by the sound.
I assume if we had a future hearing aid that bypassed the eardrum and connected to the nerves directly, we could hear long lost frequencies again.
The sound lives on in my memory. I can vividly remember the squeee of turning the TV on. Actually I can hear it right now! But I believe that is something called "tinnitus" :)
I get it, the site is mostly about fun and the internet.
But reminds me also of lost things like "the feeling of being in the backseat of a 1978 Beetle with no air conditioning as a kid on a road trip" and other lost sensations.
- Captain Crunch whistle
- Commodore C64 SAM TTS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rqxz23IxRY
In the old times I could have probably guessed what game it was loading by the sound alone, if it was one that I played often!