We have all been reading about various endangered animals and birds’ species around the world. Which means, if proper care is not taken of them, they can vanish from the face of the earth. But animals and birds are not the only things that are endangered.

With the advancement in technology and the development in various fields, there are various gadgets that have either been completely discontinued or have their newer smarter versions in the market, leaving the old one under the dust of time. However, thankfully, there is a website which keeps the sounds of obsolete gadgets from the past few decades intact at http://savethesounds.info/ — an online ‘museum of endangered sounds’, preserving the endangered and extinct sounds of archaic technology.

Save the Sound is a project character named Brendan Chilcutt — an online persona created by the team of three graduate students Phil Hadad, Marybeth Ledesma and Greg Elwood. The team further plans to develop and give more control on the experience of sounds to people to have advanced interaction with them in the future.

So how does the website work? It is as simple as you can imagine. Just open the site and explore through the thumbnails of various gadgets and their sounds from the home screen. These thumbnails are all black and white but as you click any of them to play, it will turn into colour and play the sound, click again to turn it off and play another.

Save the Sounds, also called the Museum of Endangered Sounds, currently features a rather limited collection, but the team behind the project intends to add more with time. The current collection includes the sound of a telephone rotary dial, the connecting of 56k modems, loading of VCRs, the sound of a skipping CD, the gameplay music of ‘Mind Maze’ (the quiz game built into early versions of Microsoft Encarta); the white noise of a cathode ray tube TV, the old Nokia ringtone, symphonic start-up of a windows 95 machine and many more. There is no doubt, as new products come to market, these nostalgia-inducing noises become as obsolete as the devices that make them.

So take a virtual trip to the archaic technology and listen to these vintage tech noises at the Museum of Endangered Sounds at http://savethesounds.info/

Published in Dawn, Young World, January 29th, 2022