What are some of your favourite sounds from your day to day life? How many of those noises will no longer exist five, ten years from now? Which sounds do your miss from your childhood?

In 2013, German designers Daniel Chun and Jan Derksen from Chunderksen Design built Conserve The Sound, an online museum for endangered sounds. How fun it is to hear the manic knocking of clackers – or Klick-Klack-Kugeln. Now, clackers could inflict a lot of damage as they smashed or shattered into faces. No surprise that they joined the Banned Toy list in 1985. But, when you hear a sound you haven’t heard since you were eight, the memories come rushing back.

How about the circling of a vintage phone, the click of a tape going into a cassette player, the rustle of a giant paper map being unfurled from the glove compartment, the metal whirr of a hand beater, or the reel to reel of an old projector?

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The ever-growing cache of sounds at the Conserve the Sound Museum are fun to revisit and a great resource for authors, filmmakers and others trying to relive sounds gone and going.

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Endangered Sound Museum

Written by Elizabeth Newton
www.creatorsvancouver.com

Photo Credits:

Header – Wendy Scofield

Photo #2 – Noom Peerapong