A permanent collection of extinct noises
The Museum of Lost Sounds
Twelve sounds that technology quietly retired. The whine of a television nobody could hear, the drive that thought out loud, the phone you had to wait for. Every one rebuilt from oscillators — no recordings, no files.
Headphones recommended. Some exhibits are very quiet, and one of them you may not be able to hear at all.
The collection
About This Collection
Technology rarely announces its retirements. A sound is simply everywhere for thirty years — in every office, every living room, every school corridor — and then one day it is nowhere, and nobody marks the occasion.
This is a small archive for twelve of them. Not recordings: every exhibit here is generated live in your browser from oscillators and filtered noise, which means the page weighs almost nothing and the sounds are, in a strict sense, being made for the first time each time you press play. They are reconstructions, the way a museum rebuilds a skeleton from what it knows of the bones.
How To Use It
- Put headphones on if you can. Several exhibits live at the quiet edges of hearing.
- Press play on any specimen. The oscilloscope at the top shows the waveform as it plays.
- Read the label. Each one notes roughly when the sound lived and what killed it.
- Try the CRT whine on someone younger than you. There is a decent chance they can hear it and you cannot.
Why This Exists
Sound is the most easily lost part of an object. Photographs of a rotary telephone are everywhere; the specific mechanical unwinding noise it made as the dial returned is not something you encounter unless you go looking for it. Because these noises were incidental — side effects of motors and transformers, never designed to be heard — nobody thought to preserve them.
There is also something worth noticing in what replaced them. Almost every sound here was the sound of a machine physically doing something: a head seeking, a motor spinning, a hammer striking paper. Modern devices do far more and make almost no noise at all. We gained silence, and lost the ability to hear our machines thinking.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Museum of Lost Sounds?
It is a free browser archive of twelve sounds that technology has quietly retired, from the whine of a CRT television to the clatter of a dot-matrix printer. Each one plays on demand, with a short label explaining what made the noise and why it disappeared.
Are these real recordings?
No, and that is the point. Every sound is generated live in your browser from oscillators and filtered noise using the Web Audio API. Nothing is downloaded, no audio files exist on the page, and each playback is built from scratch the moment you press play.
Why can I not hear the CRT whine?
The CRT flyback transformer sang at about 15.6 kilohertz, which sits near the upper limit of human hearing. Most people lose sensitivity to those frequencies as they get older, so many adults hear nothing at all while children in the room hear it clearly. Small laptop and phone speakers often cannot reproduce it either.
Why is the dial-up modem not included?
Because it already has a home. The dial-up handshake is the centrepiece of The Slow Web, another tool on this site that recreates the whole experience of loading a page at modem speed, so it did not need a second exhibit here.
Is anything downloaded or recorded?
No. There are no audio files to download, nothing is uploaded, and your microphone is never accessed. The page simply synthesizes sound and forgets it the moment it stops.
Does it work on mobile?
Yes. It works on any modern mobile browser, including Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. You may need to tap a play button once before sound is allowed, which is a standard browser policy, and headphones are strongly recommended for the quieter exhibits.
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