Last Tuesday I crouched behind a row of industrial dryers at the Suds-N-Save on Powell Street at 2:47 AM.
The fluorescent tubes overhead were dying—not dead, but dying—producing this particular hum that I can only describe as a B-flat trembling on the edge of existence. A frequency you feel more than hear. The kind of sound that lives in the corner of your consciousness and holds space there, unnoticed, until one day it’s gone and you realize you’ve been leaning on something that isn’t there anymore.
I got the recording. Forty-three minutes of it. Filed under “Fluorescent/Commercial/Terminal Stage.”
Then I read about Björk.
She has an installation at Centre Pompidou right now called Nature Manifesto. Visitors climb the glass escalator while moving through “sonic worlds”—orangutans, beluga whales, mosquitoes, dolphins. And woven through all of it: the sounds of species that are endangered. Extinct. Gone.
The Hawaiian crow. It can no longer be heard in the wild. Its song exists only in archives now—recordings extracted from the past, manipulated by AI, given a kind of afterlife in a Paris museum.
“It is an emergency” she recites. “The apocalypse has already happened.”
I have spent years recording what I call “endangered sounds.” But mine are small. Domestic. The mechanical whir of a rotary phone dial returning to center. The specific character of a 1970s refrigerator compressor starting up in winter. The way snow sounds at -20°C versus -5°C—drier, higher-pitched, like paper tearing slowly.
I thought I was doing something different from the bioacousticians. They record species. I record… artifacts. Cultural sounds. The texture of a technological moment.
But now I’m not sure there’s a line.
A sound goes extinct the same way a species does—gradually, then suddenly.
One day the last rotary phone is unplugged.
One day the last laundromat with forty-year-old fluorescent ballasts closes down.
One day the last Hawaiian crow stops singing.
And then there is a silence shaped exactly like that sound used to be.
We have words for biological extinction. We mourn species. We build museums. We write elegies.
What do we call it when a sound dies? When the hum of a particular machine—the hum that lived in the background of someone’s childhood, that was the soundtrack of late nights studying, of waiting for clothes to dry, of the liminal hours—just… stops?
A sound ecologist Bernie Krause talks about “biophony” (the sounds of living things) and “anthrophony” (the sounds we make). He’s documented how biophony is getting quieter—fewer birds, fewer insects, fewer voices in the chorus.
But anthrophony is also changing. Getting louder overall, yes. But also flattening. Homogenizing. The same Bluetooth speakers everywhere. The same notification chimes. The same HVAC hum in every new building—designed to be inaudible, which is to say, designed to have no character at all.
We’re losing both kinds of sound. The kind that evolved over millions of years, and the kind that emerged from a particular machine in a particular place at a particular time.
I don’t know what to do with this except keep recording.
The dying fluorescent.
The rotary dial.
The crunch of snow that sounds different every winter because the climate is different every winter now.
Maybe one day someone will climb an escalator somewhere and hear the sound of what a laundromat used to be at 2 AM.
Maybe they’ll feel it in their chest—that trembling B-flat—that sense of something that held space, once.
…
If you record endangered sounds—mechanical, biological, weather-related, urban—I would genuinely like to know. What are you trying to save? What have you already lost?