Monday, March 7, 2011

Aural Nostalgia


Sorry, I've been busy.

And speaking of busy, I tried calling a friend the other day. He's a notorious talker, so I wasn't surprised when I got a busy signal. I rolled the dice, thinking it might be one of those times when you immediately re-dial and get through. No dice. An hour later I tried calling again, and this time, to my amusement, it was still/again busy. The guy sure can talk. But after I hung up, when I was still chuckling about the guy's staying power when it comes to conversation, I realized that it's been a long time since I've heard a busy signal. You know, that urgent, kind of electronic siren noise, very immediate and rather irritating, as if telling you to hang up right now, the other guy's got a lot more important things to be doing than talking to your sorry ass right now. To be able to describe it more accurately right now for you all I guess I could call the guy up, figuring his line is busy again, but with my luck he'd answer, we'd talk for three hours, and I'd be too tired (once again) to blog. But that's kind of my point--you can't really get a busy signal at your whim these days. Everybody seems to have call waiting or voice mail that automatically comes on when you can't get through. And any kind of commercial entity has some elaborate voice-operated directory. Seriously, when was the last time you heard a busy signal? I think it's become nearly extinct. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not pining for the days when you'd dial and re-dial obsessively, only to get that rude busy signal (and didn't it seem to somehow sound ruder and ruder the more you called?) meanwhile cursing more intensely the person you needed to talk to who was so inconsiderately blabbing away with someone else. But I guess I'm just a little sad that a sound that used to be pretty prevalent--a standard life sound--seems to be joining a growing list of sounds you just don't hear too much or at all anymore. Call me aurally nostalgic tonight.

When was the last time you heard the crisp thwack (as opposed to the pretty anemic plink) of a golf ball being hit by a wood, a real wood? Chances are, unless you play golf regularly with my otherwise very hip but when it comes to golf total Luddite brother-in-law, it's been decades now. Trust me, it's a great sound now all but gone from our world. How about the last time you heard the clunk clunk psssshhhccchhhh of a good old-fashioned cash register being worked by a real artist at the grocery store whose name is probably something like Sandy or Doris? Now it's just soporific, Orwellian binks adding up your foodstuffs (am I nuts with nostalgia, or did food seem to taste better back when it was rung up via a real cash register? [at least, for now, the conveyor belt thing is still around at grocery stores--the day they replace that, scan the horizon for four horsemen]). Along the same lines, isn't the mad, rodent-like plastic tapping on keyboards an insult of sound compared to the heavy, yes-this-is-a-human-at-work-here-dammit chitch chitch chitch bing! arias of a manual typewriter?

Not that it's ever to be mourned, but with dry erase boards and quote unquote smart boards, the instant wake-up call of chalk on a blackboard seems to be another nearly all but lost sound. The tick tick tick sound coming round the bend of a Vintage VW van? The thin peeling metal sound (always the sound of a brain cell being scraped away, to my ears) of the old pop tops on aluminum cans? When was the last time you heard the cheery sound of the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson theme song coming from down the hall or through a wall? How about the last time you heard somebody say, "We named our kids Ralph and Irene"? Or somebody say, "Did you get my letter?" There should be a museum of sounds.

No comments:

Post a Comment