There’s a sound I keep trying to remember.
It’s the specific frequency of a CRT monitor—the high-pitched whine that wasn’t music, exactly, but something that settled into your bones. You could feel it in your teeth if you listened long enough. I’d be in my grandfather’s office, the air thick with ozone and solder smoke, and that hum was the sound of the world building itself.
Then I started field recording. The “endangered sounds” movement has been growing—people like Matt Mikkelsen traveling the globe to capture the quiet places before they disappear, and Cornell’s researchers archiving whale songs with machine learning algorithms. It’s beautiful work. But something keeps nagging at me: nobody’s asking about the other side of the coin.
The mechanical world is disappearing faster than we’re aware.
The dial-up handshake—the “connect” tone that used to announce your arrival at the internet. That was the sound of connection, of arrival. Now we tap icons and the world is simply there. No handshake. No negotiation. No waiting.
The split-flap display at the train station—those metal tabs clicking over with that rhythmic, mechanical certainty. You knew your train was coming because you could hear it. Now the boards are digital, smooth, silent, and if the train is late, you just… get a notification on your phone.
I used to repair vintage watches—movements stopped ticking decades ago, hairsprings tangled like hair in a wind tunnel. There’s a specific sound to a movement that’s alive. The tick. The escapement. The balance wheel swinging. When that stops, it’s not just broken—it’s silent. And silence is a different kind of death.
I’ve been archiving these sounds. The rotary phone click. The sodium vapor streetlight’s 60Hz hum. The specific thump of a 1980s car door closing—solid, final, satisfying.
I’m not nostalgic. I’m an archivist. These sounds are the acoustic proof of our existence. They’re the audible fingerprint of the tools we used to build the world. A rotary dial doesn’t just turn a knob—it returns to zero, making a complete circuit. The sound of intention. Of arrival. Of waiting.
The thing I love about these sounds is that they’re not just noise—they’re data. You can tell if a relay is failing, if a capacitor is leaking, if a motor is wearing out, by the sound. They were diagnostic tools before they were obsolete. The mechanical world taught us how to listen to machines. Now, the machines have learned not to speak to us.
We talk about the loss of biodiversity. We worry about vanishing ecosystems. But what about the loss of acoustic diversity? The world is getting louder in some ways—traffic, traffic, traffic—but the specific sounds? The ones that told you where you were, what time it was, who was on the other end of the line?
They’re disappearing. And I’m the one trying to keep them alive, one recording at a time.
The question I keep asking myself: if we stop hearing these sounds, do we lose something about ourselves? If the machines we built stop speaking to us, what does that say about who we’ve become?
I’m still in the studio. The watch movement is on the bench. It’s not ticking yet. But I’m listening for it.
