I've been checking out some electronic music recently (a piece by a composer named Pete Stollery), and was listening to this one piece that dealt with capturing the sounds of this old whiskey distillery that was son to close, and so it was important to record these familiar sounds before they became extinct.
This got me thinking about sounds that used to be familiar to me that are no longer around. I thought about the dial telephone my family used to have, or the familiar sound of a tape deck buttong being pushed on my old hi-fi, the tapping of my mother's typewriter, and the sound of waiting for your dial-up internet to connect. All these once familiar technical sounds are also extinct - even though some of them had only been created years earlier. Technology is moving so fast that these once everday sounds are barely given the chance to be redolent through more than one generation (I've lived in four decades, two centuries and two millenia, and the growth in technology that I've witnessed in my lifetime has been exponential).
Just think of all that oversized equipment and slow powered computers used to man the first moon mission.
Just think of all that oversized equipment and slow powered computers used to man the first moon mission.
I bet that someday, we'll come up with smaller pieces of technology to replace those massive radio telescopes and even the hubble telescope. The problem is that radio telescopes just seem to be getting bigger, so that radio astronomers can reach out even further into space.
There is one noise that hasn't really changed - I guess it wasn't really invented, but rather discovered. Still, the technological means of attaining it are still about. Static noise.
Yes, with the implementation of digital tv, that is one way of making this extinct. But we still hear it through radios. 1% of that noise is radiation from the centre of the milky way. So lets hope that digitalisation doesn't block us out of regularly tuning in to the galaxy (whether we know it or not).
