the online ‘museum of endangered sounds’ preserves the endangered and extinct sounds of archaic technology

created by american brendan chilcutt, the ‘museum of endangered sounds‘ is an online archive of the archaic noises of technology: the connecting of 56k modems, loading of VCRs, and operators of payphones. additional clips include a skipping CD and the gameplay music of ‘mind maze’ (the quiz game built into early versions of microsoft encarta).

currently the ‘museum of endangered sounds’ features fifteen ‘exhibits’, but chilcutt plans to add more. eventually he intends to develop a markup language to encode the sounds as binary compositions, preserving them for future generations.

chilcutt muses, ‘imagine a world where we never again hear the symphonic startup of a windows 95 machine. imagine generations of children unacquainted with the chattering of angels lodged deep within the recesses of an old cathode ray tube TV. and when the entire world has adopted devices with sleek, silent touch interfaces, where will we turn for the sound of fingers striking QWERTY keypads?’

screenshot from the museum website

via thenextweb